photo by angelin.angelini via Flickr
Dear Reader,
Scienceofthetimes.com is on a temporary hiatus while I begin a new job at Nature Publishing Group, the publisher of Nature and Scientific American. If you have enjoyed Science of the Times, please follow my latest work via Twitter.
And as long as you’re here, take a look around…
Eric R. Olson
Reporter/Editor
If you are looking for an exhaustive, comprehensive list of 2009’s best science stories–you have come to the wrong place. If that’s your cup of tea, I’ll direct you to Scientific American’s incredibly complete and insightful slide show of the year’s biggest stories.*
Instead, what follows is a compendium of the ten stories that I personally found interesting, culled from the mysterious depths of my Facebook and Twitter accounts. These are articles that, for one reason or another, I deemed compelling enough to share with my friends and colleagues–and now with you. And just like the seconds counting down to 2010, we’ll start with number ten and work our way down to number one.
Artist's rendition of Ardipithecus ramidus. (credit: J.H. Matternes)
Yesterday saw a blizzard of media surrounding the Ardipithecus paper published in the October 2nd issue of Science. A quick Google search reveals more than 600 articles published on the subject since yesterday morning.
If you don’t know already know, Ardipithecus (affectionately known as Ardi by some) is a hominid fossil discovered in Ethiopia some 15 years ago. However, the buzz is not about the fossil discovery itself, but rather the insight that Ardi is an early ancestor of humans–something that wasn’t entirely clear until now. This revelation is making scientists rewrite the book on early hominid history and also their vision of the last common ancestor we shared with chimps, more than four million years ago.
Somewhat reminiscent of the American Natural History Museum’s “missing link” campaign back in May, Ardi also has its own primetime cable television special that airs October 11th on the Discovery Channel. But if you just can’t wait, there is already a wealth of multimedia on-line to quench your Ardi thirst.
source: wikimedia commons
I am currently producing a short, animated video about the flu virus that I intend to either sell, or publish right here on Science of the Times. I had wanted to include a video interview with a flu virus researcher and had lined up Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, co-chair of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at Mount Sinai Medical Center. (more…)
While pounding away on my gym’s treadmill last night, a ridiculous number of TV screens staring at me from across the room, my eyes fixed on Lou Dobbs’ show. The TV’s sound was turned off and it showed closed-captioning in addition to CNN’s graphics. I was instantly struck by a mismatch between the phrases “antibiotic resistance” in the closed captioning and “killer virus” in the lower third. As just about everyone knows, viruses are antibiotic-resistant to begin with. (more…)
