This semester I’ve been running a graduate level seminar at the City University of New York, on the difference between philosophy of science and science studies. The latter is a broad and somewhat vaguely defined term that includes (certain kinds of) sociology of science, postmodern criticism of science, and feminist epistemology. It’s the stuff of the (in)famous science wars of the 1990s (think Sokal affair, or perhaps this most recent disgraceful episode).

And now the news from Alpha Centauri…(Oh, I’ve waited for so long to utter those words! News. From Alpha Centauri. Wow!)

Marketing people follow predictable patterns; in order to sell something it either needs to scare people or make them feel good.  "This ain't your father's" X is a timeless perceptual classic, meaning it is not old-fashioned and conservative and boring like parents.

Clostridium acetobutylicum became popular when the chemist Chaim Weizmann first used the bacterium to ferment the solvent acetone and the alcohols butanol and ethanol, collectively known as “ABE” products, from starch - he wanted to create synthetic rubber and during World War I the process was used by the British to ferment acetone for the production of cordite, the explosive propellant that replaced gunpowder in bullets and artillery shells.

I feel stuck, stuck in the continued reflection of what DSM labels mean to individuals and how they conceive their identities. Perhaps this is because so much of what I read on the internet in our online community is about identity and labels. It seems many of us are focused on what it means to be autistic and who controls the right to label and define.

Mountain glaciers respond to climate change by rapidly advancing or receding as global temperatures have spiked upward and downward numerous times throughout geological history. Those changes in glacier extent control hydrology, sediment transport, and deposition in rivers downstream. 

The sedimentary record in glaciated catchments therefore is an important archive with that can help unravel past climate changes but, unlike rivers, whose flow is controlled entirely by land surface topography, glaciers are able to flow uphill and across ridgelines - a process called "transfluence." Glacier advance and recession can result in drainage capture by transfluent ice flow, and so change catchment drainage areas and hydrological budgets. 

How some dahlias, white, yellow, red or purple, get their color is well known, but the  molecular mechanism behind the black dahlia has been a mystery. A new study shows that the distinctive black-red coloring is based on an increased accumulation of anthocyanins as a result of drastically reduced concentrations of flavones.

Dahlia variabilis hort. is a popular garden flower. Continuous dahlia breeding worldwide has led to the availability of a huge number of cultivars, 20,000 varieties, many of them showing red hues. However, black hues of dahlia flowers occur rarely, in comparison.

Want to be more creative? No problem, just take a ball and squeeze it (but only in your left hand, otherwise the consequences are as yet unknown).
Dr. Abraham Goldstein (pictured) along with colleagues at the Brain Research Center of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, published their finding in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin&Review.

Some people have a distinct, disabling sleep disorder called "primary hypersomnia" - they regularly sleep more than 70 hours per week and have difficulties awakening.

Even when awake, they still have reaction times comparable to someone who has been awake all night. Their sleepiness often interferes with work or school attendance, and conventional treatments such as stimulants bring little relief.

A universal approach to helping people who witnessed or experience genocide may be misguided, says an anthropologist.

The experience of genocide as transmitted trauma may not be universal but in the fields of human rights and memory studies, giving testimony about one's personal experience of genocide is believed to be both a moral duty and a psychological imperative for the wellbeing of the individual and the persecuted group to which they belong. The coping strategies for victims of genocide tend to be uniform: tell your story and do not let the violence you suffered be forgotten. What about descendants?