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Amateaur astronomers discovery rotating pulsar using Arecibo


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Perseid Meteor Shower Thursday and Friday


Get ready! The earth's orbit is intersecting with the orbit of the comet Swift-Tuttle tonight and tomorrow. Look up! The moon will be more faint this year, so we should have a great show. No one explained the science of meteor showers this year better than Ethan Seigel at Scienceblogs.

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The changing relationship between science journalism and scientists

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BP doctored photos....hilarity

It's pretty easy to attack BP these days--with hundreds of millions of gallons of oil floating around in the Gulf of Mexico, faulty traps and caps, and lousy attempts at compensation.

The BP photoshop mini-scandal is just one of the twigs branching off this tree of disaster. But, a funny one. Basically, BP put up a fake picture of it's 'Crisis Command Center' for the oil spill. Here's a summary in links, for those of you who haven't followed:

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Which came first, the scientist or the sensationalist?

The best headline I read last week is from Metafilter blog: "Scientists prove that lunch came before breakfast." In fact, journalists at major news sites all around the web reported that scientists have solved the infamous chicken-and-egg problem.

Which came first? The chicken. Definitively.

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Does religious belief really quell uneasiness? What would your neurons say?


Religious belief quells uneasiness in life, right? Or that's the main reason why we assume people believe.

But, is this actually true?

A group of scientist took a look at a specific area of the brain for clues.

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Philipines establishes text message system for farmers


The Philippines has been described as the "text messaging capitol of the world" (perhaps a little over-zealous, but you get the point.) While only 60% of the Filipino population owns a cell phone (compared to over 100% in the UK,) those who do, text about twice as often as users in the US, for example.

The country is taking advantage of the prevalence of text messaging in a new initiative to improve efficiency of rice farming. Funny, I think of farmers as such a non-technological lot.

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Football fandom--psychological diff between Scottish and English


Gooooaaal!

Cheering for your home team evidently solidifies your national identity if you're Scottish, while English tend to see their fan-dom as an individual preference, finds scientist Jackie Abell at Lancaster University.

This sounds like a study my 12 year old nephew would come up with. From the paper..

Support for the England football team is
not necessarily an expression of collective social identity and pride.

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"Alien Life" on Titan? Misleading headline at the Telegraph


Saturday, the Telegraph published an article deceivingly titled, "Titan: NASA scientists discover evidence 'that alien life exists on Saturn's moon'" Sounds pretty cool, right?

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Daily Mail Fearmongering Bingo

The rules are simple, take an article on science, technology or health from the Daily Mail, and count how many times the following words or phrases are used.

  • Fear
  • Danger
  • Alarm/Alarming
  • Playing God
  • Risk
  • Fall-Out
  • Pandora's Box
  • Plague
  • Weapon
  • Mistake
  • Wipe-Out
  • Step To Far
  • Concerns
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