Saturday snippets

You won’t have missed the fuss over NASA’s their non-extra-terrestrial life, where evidence suggests that a bacteria may show signs of tolerance to arsenic received wide coverage in the media. xkcd, of on-line cartoon fame, offers this

There’s a great collection of commentary to Richard Thaler’s call for informed examples of ’things we [science] once thought were true and took forever to unlearn’, starting with this question:

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

There are some excellent responses, and you may recognise some of the names. It’s well worth some time.

Jennifer Ouellette has posted a series of short book reviews, one of them sci-fi. Among them are Brian Switek’s Written in Stone and Mike Brown’s I killed Pluto and why it had it coming. Perhaps you’ll find that missing present there?

In addition to the nearly 900 posts submitted to Open Laboratory 2011,more science blog reading can be had with the submissions to the blogging competition for the NESCent travel awards to the ScienceOnline2011 meeting are available on-line. (Not all entries are listed at the time of writing.)

The Genome 10K project, which aims to sequence the genomes of 10,000 species, gathers momentum with the announcement that the Beijing Genomics Institute is to sequence 101 genomes from different species over the next two years. Me? I’d be developing new algorithms to make the most of all the data.

If landscape photography–or perhaps meteorology–is your thing, check out the stunning shot of a super-cell thunderstorm hosted on Bioemphemera.

(Updated for small typo.)

In response to Garth George’s dig at science…

900 of the best

Should media only report facts and leave interpretation to the universities?

Understanding the brain through controlling it

Immunisation, then and now