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2013

NASA launches MAVEN, there is much rejoicing

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We’re talking about water on Mars! Again! I think even hardcore Mars nuts might be getting tired of this, which is kind of a shame because it is really interesting. With varying caveats, we’ve known for a long time that Mars had water. More recently we got confirmation that it still does. But a lot of that water is still unaccounted for. The geology tells us that there were vast bodies of water at one time; NASA is interested in finding out where that water is now. To that end, they shot another amazing piece of engineering, MAVEN, into space yesterday—but with much less fanfare than the Curiosity launch.

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Evaluating a news source

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Most people seem to want news they can trust, and most people I know think that’s quite hard to find. There are many, many reasons for this, but I’m going to try (notwithstanding the 8,000-word first draft of this piece) to only talk about the ones that are most helpful if you’re trying to decide whether you think a particular source is credible. And so as not to bury my lede: There is no single news source that I would treat as generally trustworthy. Think of the news as your gossipy friend: He might be full of information that you actually want to hear, but you can’t let your guard down, since you also know he’ll say almost anything for attention. So if you want to have decent news intuition without procuring a highly marketable communications degree of your own, here are a few questions that can make it a bit easier to figure out how many grains of salt you’re going to need.

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A smartphone-based mobile lab?

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Engineers at Cornell University presented work on smartphone-based medicine at CLEO: 2013 last month, the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics. Their creation is an external device that connects to a smartphone and can be used to diagnose Kaposi’s sarcoma and a slew of other serious conditions. Based on the press release, the smartphone itself isn’t doing any sensing. Instead, it acts as a lightweight and (relatively) low-cost computer that analyzes the input from the external device and displays the results to the user.

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The death of the death of megafauna

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Being a fan of science fact is a lot like being a fan of science fiction: every once in a while, a team of writers decides to obliterate your personal canon, seemingly because they hate you and want you to suffer. Actually that’s mostly just Steven Moffat; in the case of scientists it’s usually because new data has come to light or existing data has been reassessed. This time around, it’s old data that’s been reviewed.

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Adventures in Ottawa

One of the great things about the way Talk Science to Me does business is that we use the best people we can find, no matter where we find them. While most of our associates live in Vancouver, we’ve gone as far as the Yukon and Minnesota to find talent that meets our clients’ needs. The downside, though, is that some of us rarely see each other face-to-face. So this week was an exciting milestone for our editorial team, when we gathered in Ottawa to meet with our newest client, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. It was, in fact, the first time we’ve all been together in the same room. So of course we had to take a picture to celebrate the occasion:

2013-04-30 11.59.01

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Making the myth of patient zero

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Don Sapatkin has a really interesting piece up at philly.com right now. It chronicles the origin of the “patient zero” narrative. If you’re not familiar, the story is that all known cases of HIV in the United States can be traced back to a single, unusually promiscuous individual, a flight attendant from Canada named Gaetan Dugas. While a lot of people have known this to be bunk basically since it was published, many others seem to believe it. I first encountered it on a message board where it was posted as an interesting factoid.

HIV-budding-Color

What Sapatkin’s article reveals is that the entire “Patient Zero” story was a calculated PR strategy by HIV researchers and public health officials who had become desperate to bring the disease into the public eye. According to the people quoted in the article, it worked. According to others, the effect on Dugas was ruinous, and his treatment utterly inhumane. Read More »Making the myth of patient zero

The Finkbeiner test

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The description for this picture is careful to mention that Mary Alice McWhinnie was the first woman to serve as chief scientist at an Arctic research station. Retrieved from Wikimedia commons, presumed to be public domain. Originally uploaded by the Smithsonian Institution.Christie Aschwanden has an excellent piece up at XX Science, with a simple experiment you can do at home to identify sexism in science journalism! As a long-time fan of the Bechdel Test, I’m easily convinced that science journalism warrants a similar instrument. Finkbeiner’s test is interesting because, unlike the Bechdel Test (which primarily reveals a lack of individuality and agency in fictional women), it has components specifically designed to call attention to “benevolent” sexism. Having applied the test, I believe that science journalism has made great strides forward, and finally achieved routine tokenism. Baby steps.

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Stand back, I’m about to do editing

I recently received a letter from the Editors Association of Canada informing me that I’ve passed the last of my exams and successfully earned the right to put the letters CPE after my name: I’m a certified professional editor. The copy itself was very clean, so I sent it back to them with only a few stylistic suggestions.

Joking aside, I now have a widely recognized professional credential as an editor. What might seem a bit strange is that I’ve already edited thousands of pages of text for dozens of clients. That would seem to make me a professional editor by any reasonable definition. The key in this case is the “certified” part.

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