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Advent Calendar of Science Stories 17: Kickstarter in 1921

There's no way I could possibly go through a long history-of-science blog series without mentioning the great Marie Skłodowska Curie, one of the very few people in history to win not one but two Nobel Prizes for her scientific work-- if nothing else, Polish pride would demand it. She made a monumental contribution to physics through her work on radioactivity (and through being nearly impossible to kill-- while her work on isolating radium made her ill for many years, she outlived an amazing number of her assistants...), and there are a lot of great stories about her. This series is partly…

Freethinker Sunday Sermonette: December 21, 2012. End of the world.

Forget about climate change. We're not going to make it that far. December 21, 2012 is earth's final day. If you'd like to know the details you can buy the exciting video teaching from Drs. Jack and Rexella Van Impe, December 21st 2012: History's Final Day. Everyone seems agreed on the date. Everyone, in this case, being ancient Romans, ancient Mayans, the Chinese I Ching, and a 16th century English prophetess named Mother Shipton. This is not parody. The Reverend Jack van Impe and his wife, are among the world's most experienced at predicting the End of the World and selling videos about it…

I thought it was just razor blades in the apples

Kimberly Daniels of the Christian Broadcasting Network has a warning for trick-or-treaters. "[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches," Daniels wrote. "I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference." I think Kimberly is just one of those obnoxious cheapskates who wants an excuse to hand out bible tracts on Halloween. Although, if I were a witch, I'd…

Free Influenza Medical Text

Just to let everyone know, if they don't already: freebooks4doctors has a downloadable text, Influenza Report 2006. It is a 225-page, 2.7 MB PDF. Being from 2006, it does not specifically cover the current situation. Rather, it focuses a bit on avian influenza. Still, it is a reasonably good source of information. If you want, you can buy a hard copy for 25 Euros, but anyone can download the free copy. Influenza Report ISBN 3-924774-51-X Influenza Report is a medical textbook that provides a comprehensive overview of epidemic and pandemic influenza. Influenza Report has also been…

If you liked the lab rat and frog...

If you thought the knitted Lab Rat and Frog were cool, check out these guys: They're Food Chain Friends! Thanks to someone's great insight at FAO Schwarz, you can buy your kids these loveable critters which demonstrate the food chain in all its plushy goodness. Food Chain Friends are from Daro, a small green planet modeled after the planet Earth 200 mya. "Daro teems with wildlife, and its exceptionally social and gracious species flourish in a complex - but oddly, very friendly - ecosystem." The best part, however, might be the slogan: "They're friends. They eat each other. It's a complicated…

Panda poop to be made into paper

I just though you all would be interested in this ;) There's a new Chinese saying: When life hands you panda poop, make paper. Researchers at a giant panda reserve in southern China are looking for paper mills to process their surplus of fiber-rich panda excrement into high quality paper. ... The Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand already sells multicolored paper made from the excrement produced by its two resident pandas. Making paper there involves a daylong process of cleaning the feces, boiling it in a soda solution, bleaching it with chlorine and drying it under the sun. Here's the…

Killing Birds With Your Grocery List

Spring is in the air. And birds are starting to show up in America and elsewhere from their wintering grounds, gearing up to sing their little hearts out. Unfortunately, many of us are contributing to the decline of those birds by the food we choose to buy. It is a complicated, globalized world these days. But, if you like those birds singing at your windowsill in spring, you may want to modify your grocery list. In today's New York Times, Bridget Stutchbury wonderfully articulates the link between our food shopping habits and birds dropping dead left and right. And more importantly, what we…

Luminous wine-throated hummingbird

An absolutely beautiful hummingbird illustration by paperfashion, AKA Kathryn Elyse: According to the etsy listing, it's pencil, ink and watercolor. That tickles me, because yes you can get those bold colors in watercolors, but few people do, and I thought it might be digital. As you can see from her etsy shop (where you can buy a print), the artist predominantly does fashion illustration -- but then, this hummingbird looks like it's wearing bird haute couture. It positively glows. Painting by Kathryn Elyse, based on an original photo by Jose Yee. (The photo is on a velvety black field, so…

Beer Microscopy Project

Long nights, sitting at the microscope, slide after slide.......don't you just wish you had a beer? Slurp slurp. Ahhhh, thats better. Wait, I wonder what *beer* would look like under the microscope! Let's try it! I think thats what someone at Florida State thought when they decided to start this project, Molecular Expressions: The Beershots Photo Gallery, which has digital images of bunches of famous beers from around the world. Chinese beer Tsingtao: Pilsner Urquel: Guinness: Heineken: You can buy prints, posters, and even a book. No money? There's a free screen saver. And if beer ain't…

Donors choose---almost there!

You guys are great. Large donations continue to trickle in, but really, we can live quite well off of small donations. It would be really cool if we finished off the drive with a bunch of micro-donations, in the 1-10 dollar range. These small donations add up really quickly. A Story to Tell is $97 away from being fully funded, allowing the teacher to buy a laptop and printer. Inner City Soccer Team is a bit more of a challenge with $376 to go. There is no reason we can't get this done before the end of the week. So let's do it---a buck here, a buck there, and soon enough...

Science Blogging Conference - who is coming? (The Serbs are coming!)

There are 83 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 109 registered participants and if you do not register soon, it may be too late once you decide to do so (we'll cap at about 230). Between now and the conference, I am highlighting some of the people who will be there, for you to meet in person if you register in time. Tatjana Jovanovic, better known to the readers of this blog by her online pseudonym 'tanjasova' was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia,…

Monday What-to-Eat Post

So here's what we actually ate yesterday. In addition to the list below, btw, C. and K., the new guys ate a fair number of totally non-local oranges and bananas, as well as some local apples. Because they've experienced real hunger, they have a bowl of fruit in their room that they can eat anytime, so that they never need to worry there won't be food. The first night they were with us Eric took them shopping and let them pick out some junk food to put in the bowl (sugary granola bars and fruit-roll ups), but when we ran out of that stuff, we moved on to just fruit, which is going very well…

Hoarding vs. Storing: Examples from Fukushima

In the latest news from Fukushima, water in Tokyo has been deemed unfit for babies to consume because of high radiation levels. Not surprisingly, shortages of bottled water are emerging, as people buy up larger quantities. A top Japanese official urged residents of the nation's capital not to hoard bottled water Wednesday after Tokyo's government found that radioactive material in tap water had exceeded the limit considered safe for infants. "We have to consider Miyagi and Iwate and other disaster-hit areas," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said. "I'd like to again urge consumers not to…

Textbooks: where are they going?

In the past couple of weeks, we have had two different publishers 'pitch' their online homework system. First, they are fine people and interesting products, but I just don't think this is going to work. Online Books I think the publisher's plan is to have a textbook, and offer extra stuff to go with it (including an ebook). However, for all the ones I have seen, there are problems with the ebooks. You can't keep them forever. It depends on the terms of the service, and maybe this is long enough. The terms seem to vary from 1 year to 5 years. If you are in certain fields (physic or…

Computers vs. the science class: IT 1, Instructor 0

It's hard to teach bioinformatics when schools work so hard to keep us from using computers. Anecdotes from the past Back in my days as a full-time instructor, I fought many battles with our IT department. Like many colleges, we had a few centralized computer labs, tightly controlled by IT (aka the IT nazis), where students were supposed to go to do their computing. Instructors also had a centralized computer lab, but over the years, we gained the right to have computers in our offices. Our major battle was whether or not we'd be allowed to use Macs. There are certainly advantages in…

Future Farms Will Be Run By Robots

I have a love-hate relationship with farmers. I have a great deal of respect for the enterprise and for those who dedicate their lives to it. But, I also become annoyed at the culture in which modern American farming embeds itself. And, I don't feel a lot of reticence talking openly about that. Having done plenty of farming myself, I don't feel the need that so many others do to be extra nice to farmers out of lack of understanding. I know when the farmers complain about too little or too much rain, they are studiously ignoring the fact that if it is harder to plant or harvest, they make out…

Fightin' words

Jim Zumbo is a famous hunter, and has been writing about guns, the outdoors, and hunting, for decades. He has a TV show and is an editor and writer for the second largest outdoor magazine in the nation. Or rather, he was all those things. He lost it all one evening, when, after a hard day of hunting on a Remington Arms funded coyote hunt, Zumbo blogged the following words: "Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity," Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. "As…

Ten Days to Go: Carbon Neutral Touring

Well, there are ten days until the official publication date of the paperback Republican War on Science (August 28). And I have decided, based on the suggestion of an e-correspondent, to do a countdown here on the blog, adding a relevant new angle, analysis, or update every day. So here's the first: I am doing a book tour over the course of September, and having just booked the travel, I can now calculate that it will require flying some 11,000 miles. Back in July when I flew over to London, folks really kicked my butt about the size of my carbon footprint, and rightly so. And so I decided…

Liberals & atheists are smarter than conservatives & very religious, but why?

Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent: The origin of values and preferences is an unresolved theoretical question in behavioral and social sciences. The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis, derived from the Savanna Principle and a theory of the evolution of general intelligence, suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals, but that general intelligence may have no effect on the acquisition and espousal…

Neuromarketing

Last week, I reviewed Buyology, a new book on neuromarketing, in the Washington Post. Although the book is based on a large, privately funded neuromarketing experiment, I wasn't so wowed by the science: If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these companies got ripped off. It's not that the book doesn't have interesting moments: I enjoyed learning about how slices of lime got indelibly associated with Corona beer and why the logos plastered on race cars are so effective at getting consumers to buy particular brands. However, what makes these stories interesting is that, unlike the rest of…

My Picks From ScienceDaily

Origins Of Nervous System Found In Genes Of Sea Sponge: Scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara have discovered significant clues to the evolutionary origins of the nervous system by studying the genome of a sea sponge, a member of a group considered to be among the most ancient of all animals. [PZ Myers explains it better] Hives Ferment A Yeasty Brew, Attract Beetle Pest: The honeybee's alarm signal may not only bring help, but also attract the small hive beetle. Now, an international team of researchers has found that small hive beetles can detect some alarm pheromones at…

Social media and scientific conferences: the discussion continues

There has been some very interesting online discussion in a number of venues today about the topic of social media and scientific conferences. For those who missed my post yesterday, the discussion was sparked by an article in ScienceInsider reporting that Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory had produced a new policy on the use of social media at its conferences, which essentially states that attendees should ask permission from presenters before discussing their work online (it's worth noting that this policy is one that CSHL has long applied to affiliated reporters). The policy release was…

ASIS&T update

A quick update on the Milwaukee events.... The first time I went to Mocha's (much better wifi than the hotel and it is free) I saw a familiar face walk in - from Scifoo! World is small. She promised to come to the Science Blogging Conference (I am leaving the name out so not to play Gotcha later if she manages not to come in January). Jean-Claude, Janet, Christina Pikas and I went to dinner at Water Street Brewery last night - all four of us will meet again in January at the Science Blogging Conference. Janet, Jean-Claude and I had lunch at 105-year old German Mader's Restaurant. Back at…

House to Vote on Anti-Gambling Measure

The House is set to vote today on a bill to ban online gambling in the United States. And you've gotta love the sober, logical analysis of those who support such legislation: John Kindt, a business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who has studied the issue, calls the Internet "the crack cocaine" of gambling. "There are no needle marks. There's no alcohol on the breath. You just click the mouse and lose your house," he said. Wow, it's that simple? Just click your mouse and lose your house? That will make a great ad campaign for the gaming sites. You know, because it…

Real sign, real poll

The Joliet Jackhammers, a baseball team in Illinois, have put up an interesting sign to get people to buy tickets. Some people are unhappy and want it taken down. "It's in very poor taste," Councilwoman Jan Hallums Quillman said. "To have God tell you to buy tickets? Give me a break." I wonder if Quillman felt the same way about the serious billboard campaign that had God announcing his will and intentions? There was one that read, "Let's Meet At My House Sunday Before the Game -God." Was that in poor taste? It seems to me that many people think it's perfectly alright to put words in their…

Blog Memes I: Five Things

Evolving Complexity tagged me in.  Here they are: 5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago Buzzing on yerba maté Learning Portuguese Living in Asunción's transvestite district Picking out sites for the incoming Peace Corps volunteers Applying to graduate school 5 Things On My To-Do List Today Process the latest batch of RNA pol II sequences Buy stamps Pay the bills & the rent Renew my subscription to National Geographic Email the Brazilians 5 Snacks I Love Bagels Junior Mints Cheese (various) Double-chocolate cookies Is bacon a snack? 5 Things I'd do if I was a Millionaire Buy a…

A Sickly Computer May Delay Joy of Science Course

My laptop appears to be suddenly dying, one component at at time...first the touchpad went away, and now the keyboard doesn't work. I can still operate it with an external mouse and keyboard but I'm afraid it's about to die on me completely. Fortunately I have everything backed up but if it does die, I'm going to be offline for a few days till I either get it repaired or buy a new computer. I'm sure it will cost so much to get it repaired it will almost be enough to buy a new computer, but I really can't afford a new computer right now. Dammit. If you do not see postings on Monday, Feb…

Science Blogging Conference - Videos and essential blog posts

[Bumped up to make it easier for me to update, and links placed under the fold so not to clutter the front page] Here's a collection of blog posts written during the Science Blogging Conference (more will be added over the next couple of days as people write their posts after recovering from travel) and the collection of video recordings of several sessions. Also, check out all the other action from today.... Friday, January 18th, 2008: Blogging101, Lab Tours and Dinner A Blog Around The Clock: Science Blogging Conference - Blog and Media Coverage A Blog Around The Clock: No matter where you…

Links 1/22/11

It's kinda cold. Warm up with some links. Science: Conspiracies Don't Kill Birds. People, However, Do. A 34,000 year old bacteria has come back from the dead and is breeding Octopus tool use Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure Global vaccine efforts offer hope to millions (Stopped clock, twice a day, and all that) Other: 5 Things I Love About the New BPL Online Catalog What Makes Abortion Dangerous. Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Health Insurance -In 1798 The Civility Diversion A requiem for Israel's Labor Party Maybe Jared Loughner Was a Bigot…

Darwin's diary images online

Courtesy of the inimitable Jason Grossman, who passes such things along to me, comes this announcement from the even more inimitable John van Whye who is responsible for the Darwin online project: Friends of Mr Darwin may be interested to learn that images of his diary or 'Journal' (DAR158) now join the online transcription (provided by the Correspondence Project). The transcription and new images can be seen here. I am of course aghast that Dr van Whye failed to note that Darwin died with a doctorate honoris causa, and hence should be called Dr Darwin, even at the risk of confusing him…

Airlock examples

I was going through and tagging some old posts. While looking at a post attacking the movie Sunshine, I accidentally found something else on youtube. Gravity in Sunshine I could not find a clip online of the scene I want, so I made a cartoon. Basically, (oh - spoiler alert) some guys are trying to get from one spaceship to another by shooting out of the airlock and into the other. They fly through space and into the other airlock, close the door and emergency pump the air in. When the closed air lock fills with air, they all fall down. Since there was no online video version, I made a…

Open Laboratory - old Prefaces and Introductions

One difference between reading Open Laboratory anthologies and reading the original posts included in them is that the printed versions are slightly edited and polished. Another difference is that the Prefaces and Introductions can be found only in the books. They have never been placed online. But now that four books are out and we are halfway through collecting entries for the fifth one, when only the 2009 book is still selling, I think it is perfectly OK to place Prefaces and Introductions that I wrote myself online. I wrote Prefaces for the 2006, 2007 and 2008 book, as well as the…

Age and Privacy

Media reports teem with stories of young people posting salacious photos online, writing about alcohol-fueled misdeeds on social networking sites, and publicizing other ill-considered escapades that may haunt them in the future. These anecdotes are interpreted as representing a generation-wide shift in attitude toward information privacy. Many commentators therefore claim that young people "are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are." This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults' attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced…

Youth Online Literacy: What's Going On Out There?

As many of you know, I've been working for the past couple of years on youth internet health and education issues. While the stereotype is that younger = tech savvier, that's not strictly true. Younger kids may be better acquainted with the internet, may use it more, and may feel more comfortable with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the cognitive skills or experience to differentiate between manipulative content, unreliable content, and good content. How many of you, as adults, have been tricked into clicking on a deceptive banner ad that looked like genuine content? How many…

Pills, profits and medical schools

When I was in medical school it was common to get gifts from drug companies. Since many of us had very little money, the gifts were welcome. One company gave me a Littman stethoscope, at the time, the most advanced stethoscope around. The same model costs about $100 now. I was glad to get it, although I can't tell you the name of the company. I forgot the names as quickly as I pocketed their gifts. We all got lots of free samples, too, and they were often things like tranquilizers sent through the mail and left in the magazine bin in my apartment house common mailbox area. Yes, these folks…

Bad Bailouts?

It's economics time again. I hate economics. I find it hopelessly dull. But apparently my style of explaining it is really helpful to people, so they keep sending me questions; and as usual, I do my best to try to answer them. Even if I don't particularly enjoy it. So people have been asking me to explain what the proposed bank bailout plan is, how it's supposed to work, and why so many people are upset about it. Background The basic problem underlying the current financial mess is, quite simply, that banks made a lot of bad loans. They took those bad loans, and bundled them up into…

Casual Fridays: Who's tab-happy -- and who's not

Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my (incorrect) observation that the latest beta version of Firefox always displays tabs. (Actually, while it defaults to that setting, it's possible to disable it.) When I pointed this out on Twitter, the reaction was one of astonished disbelief that I might ever not want to be viewing multiple tabs. Am I the only person left who doesn't always use tabs? And who uses the most tabs? We asked readers how many tabs they currently had open, as well as several other questions about their internet habits and opinions. As it turns out, I'm in a…

WSJ Health Blog and NYT 'Well' Tie for 2nd Place in AHCJ Excellence Online

Just a quick note of congratulations to friends of Terra Sig (FOTS, if you will) on earning 2008 Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism from the Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ). Online FIRST: M.B. Pell, Jim Morris and Jillian Olsen, Center for Public Integrity, "Perils of the New Pesticides" SECOND (tie): Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times, The "Well" blog SECOND (tie): Scott Hensley, Jacob Goldstein and Sarah Rubenstein, The Wall Street Journal Online, The Wall Street Journal Health Blog THIRD: Randy Dotinga, Voice of San Diego, "Suicide Magnet" [Part I, Part II] You…

NIH - loan repayment awards

From today's email: Dear Colleague: NIH is inviting health professionals engaged in biomedical and behavioral research to apply online for a loan repayment award. The loan repayment programs (LRPs) are a vital component of our nation's efforts to recruit and retain highly qualified professionals to careers in research. NIH annually awards loan repayment contracts to approximately 1,600 health professionals with an average award of $52,000. More than 50% of the awards are made to individuals less than 5 years out of school. Approximately 40% of all new applicants are funded and 70% of…

Goats, lotteries and the Reverend father

I don’t usually highlight my e-mail spam, but this was so priceless, I just had to. So much wrong here: Guinness is running its "Online Lottery" out of a PO box in Killorglin. I’ve seen Killorglin. It’s best known for a goat being annually named King of Ireland. Seriously. And apparently now the payment representative is working out of the UK (+44) with a Hotmail account. Who have thunk it? And the general manager of the notification department is a Reverend. As in priest. These people aren’t even trying anymore. Full text below the fold. Guinness Online Lottery. Diageo Ireland P.O. Box…

Recommendations for crafting your online presence as your real life changes

Thanks so much to Propter Doc for helping me moderate the Transitions session at ScienceOnline09. Our goal for the session was to draft a list of "best practices" for handling your online presence as you move through personal and professional transitions in the off-line world. Thanks to all the participants in the session for offering up their advice, stories, and wisdom and helping us come up with just such a list. Propter Doc has now got the complete list posted on Lecturer Notes, but I'll offer up a few highlights here. Be ready with an argument to support your blog (why it benefits you…

Buy-in and finger-wagging: another reason scientists may be tuning out ethics.

I was thinking some more about the Paul Root Wolpe commentary on how scientists avoid thinking about ethics, partly because Benjamin Cohen at The World's Fair wonders why ethics makes scientists more protective of their individuality than, say, the peer-review system or other bits of institutional scientific furniture do. My sense is that at least part of what's going on here is that scientists feel like ethics are being imposed on them from without. Worse, the people exhorting scientists to take ethics seriously often seem to take a finger-wagging approach. And this, I suspect, makes it…

Good-bye ScienceBlogs, and Thank You

Three years ago I didn't even know what science blogging was. Frustrated as a freelance writer, I typed "science blog" into my search engine and was thrilled when this network showed up first on the list. Here was a community of researchers and writers whose love of learning and the sharing of knowledge was communicated on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. After spending much of the day reading through posts by GrrlScientist, PZ, Bora, Carl, Chris and Sheril as well as John and Afarensis I was hooked. I made a decision right then and there that I would write for ScienceBlogs. I…

The Morality of Walking Away: How Deregulation Hurts a Conservative Ethos

It's interesting how we're trained to tolerate or engage in a lot of behaviors that, rationally, don't make much sense. Workers who realize that, in today's job market, loyalty to a company doesn't make much sense, are accused of disloyalty by their employers, even though those same employers will let employees go at the drop of a hat. Another economic morality tale is that letting a bank foreclose on your home is an awful thing, even when foreclosure makes economic sense: ...why should Mr. Lewis be "astonished" that people who can pay their mortgage refuse to do so when the home value is…

Why Do So Many Smokers Keep Paying High Tobacco Taxes?

The World Health Organization has declared that "tobacco taxes are the most effective way to reduce tobacco use, especially among young people and the poor," but Slate's James Ledbetter points out that in the US, there's a portion of the smoking population that keeps on paying them: Over the last decade or so, several states and jurisdictions have experimented with massive cigarette tax increases, as much as 100 percent or more over the existing rate. California, for example, still has a relatively low state cigarette tax, but in January 1999, it ballooned from 37 cents a pack to 87 cents. In…

Links for 2011-04-10

"Tie this to your lanyard, Billy Collins" "My brother Aryaman (the talented one) writes: "A colleague of mine who is interested in pursuing science education after her PhD was directed to a collection of (I think apocryphal) answers to science questions from 5th and 6th graders in Japan. I noticed many of them were almost little haikus. So I took the time to work some into form..."" (tags: science education world japan poetry blogs culture silly shalizi) You can't be a fan of SF and lament the rise of ebooks - The Word - According To Me | The Word "It happens so often, people that are…

I Bought a Kindle!

I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point technology left me behind. I still can't play those first-person video games without getting dizzy and confused. On those rare occasions when I want to record a television program, I use videotape. I despise cell phones, though I do begrudgingly admit they have their uses. (During my recent trip to New Orleans I sent my very first text message!) I still buy CD's from time to time. And ever since I started reading articles about the demise of print books, I have been doing my part to keep the industry afloat. This is partly because I…

Legal Victory for Bloggers

A California appeals court handed a huge victory to bloggers last week, ruling that from the standpoint of the law, bloggers are essentially the same as regular journalists and entitled to the same protections. The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court's ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable. In its ruling, the appeals court said…

Signs of life in medical social media

Many of us who are involved in social media have bemoaned the sluggishness of our own professions in adopting new media. There are two notable developments in my own field that seem to be holding up. The first is the twitter stream for the American Medical News. This is an online and print newsletter put out by the American Medical Association, but in true social media fashion, the feed is not simply a conduit for their own articles. The feed retweets frequently and tweets stories from other media outlets and blogs. The second is a blog from my own specialty organization, the American…

YouTube: A Curse on the Cute Little Loris?

Here's Alexis Madrigal on why the slow loris' newfound YouTube fame could be the worst possible thing for the little primates: Talk about a buzzkill: watching a video of a cute animal on the Internet may -- in some small way -- lead to it being ripped from its mother, abused, and sold on the global market. I know, I know: most of us can coo over small furry critters with extreme neoteny, while refraining from buying them on the black market. And it's not YouTube's fault that the loris is adorable. It's just truly sad that popularizing an endangered animal most people don't even realize exists…