Blogs to get you thinking
What can forensics teach us about the Vikings? What’s really going on with Himalayan tahr in New Zealand? How can we use science to reduce gun violence?
These questions may seem very different, but you can find the answers in two great blog websites: PLOS Blogs and NZ Sciblogs.
They are home to blogs that cover a wide variety of scientific topics and Sciblogs is specific to New Zealand, although not exclusively so.
Both are better places to spend time on Christmas Eve than the shopping malls.
The Public Library of Science (PLOS) is a non-profit publisher of peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journals.
It hosts blogs written by staff members as well as independent blogs by scientists. The result is information about everything from genomics to scientific controversies, and biology to paleontology.
Sciblogs is an ‘‘online forum for discussion of everything from clinical health to climate change’’.
It’s for ‘‘scientists who want to reach out to a general audience to explain their science.
Some Sciblog contributors spend most of their time in the lab or buried in research. Others are authors or entrepreneurs. All of them know what they are talking about,’’ according to the website. It was founded by Stuff science columnist Peter Griffin when he headed up the NZ Science Media Centre.
Some recent PLOS blogs stand out. In geneticist Ricki Lewis’ DNA Science Blog, the anniversary of Kristallnacht is explored through the lens of genomics. She discusses how the Holocaust and other anti-Semitic events created population bottlenecks that can be detected in the DNA of people with Ashkenazi ancestry.
Researchers Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders, in Obesity Panacea, focus on weight-loss gimmicks, such as whether Instagram fitness gurus inspire people to become more active.
Other blogs mine the latest research published in PLOS journals, including a study that asks about the effects of climate on koalas’ and kangaroos’ teeth.
At Sciblogs, Dr Alison Campbell’s syndicated BioBlog features topics such as how brown bears mated with the now-extinct cave bears about 40,000 years ago. Male cave bears weighed about 1000 kilograms and were twice the average size of today’s polar bears.
In Public Health Expert, University of Otago, Wellington, Professor Tony Blakely and colleagues tackle big questions on New Zealand human health: Sugary drinks, salty food, tobacco advertising, the influenza epidemic of 1918 and more.
Meanwhile, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates has once again blogged (gatesnotes.com) about this favourite books of the year. Among them were:
❚ Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. Recently named by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of the year, Westover’s memoir describes growing up in a survivalist family and not attending school.
❚ Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War, by Paul Scharre. ‘‘This thoughtprovoking look at AI in warfare is hard to put down,’’ Gates wrote. Scharre, a Pentagon defence expert and former army ranger, ‘‘writes clearly about a huge range of topics: computer science, military strategy, history, philosophy, psychology and ethics’’.
❚ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. This examines the rise and fall of health technology company Theranos. ‘‘This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly US$10 billion’’. All are available as ebooks.
– With the Washington Post