With silliness running riot at ScienceBlogs, it's more important than ever to keep your fraud-detection skills sharp. Thankfully, the BBC is here to help, with a list of real news stories that sound like they might be hoaxes (via Making Light).
Unfortunately, they're mostly not very funny. A couple are just lame celebrity trivia. But it's the thought that counts.
(As far as actual hoax posts go, I sort of like jefitoblog's Idiot's Guide to Kenny G ("Is it his mellifluous playing or the beautiful songs that make the record so great? Heck, that's easy: Both!"). April Fool posts in general tend toward the depressingly lame, though. Dying is easy, comedy is hard.)
More like this
This groundbreaking report--"Marion duPont Scott Equine Medical Center offers new treatment for lameness"-- just out, is riveting. And I think this says it all:
Blogging is slow this week. I've got a talk at AAAS in Chicago to prepare, an abstract for a conference in Montreal to prepare, and a dissertation to complete.
Daniel Zwerdling has an excellent article on the chicken slaughter industry in the latest Gourmet. I had no idea that Americans consumed more than 9 billion broiler chickens every year. Or that, thanks to newfangled forms of feed, it only takes a broiler chicken six weeks to reach market weight.
Last week, I wrote about the latest attempt to defy the laws of thermodynamics and make a free energy machine and how it went down in flames.