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This Week in Science Celebrates its 300th Episode!
Show Notes:
Number 11: Lancet retraction
Number 10: Microbes everywhere
The water of Lost Hammer
Animals Survive Without Oxygen
Microbes Are the Key to a Happy Gut
Number 9: Solar ships
Space Ship Sails on a Breeze of Sunshine
Sun-Powered Plane Takes a 24-Hour Flight
Number 8: Visions of our universe
A Portrait of Saturn’s Moons
The Map of Everything
Is Life’s Chemistry Cooking on Titan?
Number 7: Prostheses
E-Legs by Berkeley Bionics
Restoring vision in the blind
Second sight in the market
Retina implant
Robot Skin Can Feel Your Touch
Number 6: Big Physics
Large Hadron Collider Gets Going With a Bang
Large Hadron Collider officially made the switch from protons to lead ions
Early universe was a liquid
Antimatter atoms successfully stored for the first time
Do Physical Laws Vary From Place to Place?
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Number 5: Commercial Space Flight
Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule
Working with NASA
Number 4: Neanderthals + Humans
Stone-Age Romeos and Juliets
Number 3: Ocean Census
Marine Census Completes Its Count
Census of marine life
Number 2: Synthetic Life and regenerative medicine
Creation of synthetic life and conversations about regulation
Nerve cells created from stem cells
Number 1: NASA
NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical –
The Goldilocks Planet
The First Peek at the Solar System’s Edge
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory – A Portrait of a Violent Star
Water on the Moon
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I'm the host of this little science show. 
I don’t know how to say this without sounding sarcastic…
Honestly, I found the conversation about bondage sex in space quite fascinating.
An elastic exercise band might be used to pull the pair back together.
Since arms would tire quickly, and are located far from the pelvis, wrap the elastic around both partners’ midsections.
Though, drift about the living space might be an issue in this compromised position.
An alternative would be for one partner to be against a surface, while the other uses the elastic attached to the wall.
Anyone have other ideas?
I want to talk about two publications: Arsenic-loving Bacteria and Vaccine-linked Autism.
Both studies have serious faults in their methodology.
Both studies have big money (read as: bias) behind them.
Wakefield got money from lawsuits, NASA gets funding from the government.
I argue that it is as equally unacceptable to publish either of these studies.
It turns out the Wakefield paper was wrong, and I hope that the NASA paper was right.
Publishing work before it has been peer reviewed is not how science works.
Magazines hire “peers” to review papers BEFORE publication, so they can avoid junk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review#Prepublication_reviews
Scientific practices aside, the press conference was the real joke.
NASA is doing the world a disservice with it’s premature annunciation!
It is villainous to push policy (for NASA funding, or against child vaccination) based on a single, poorly conducted study!
Science popularization easily confuses the layperson because the signal is scrambled so heavily by the mass media.
In order for any positive net information to be communicated, the state of scientific understanding must be reasonably secure (unlike the two papers in question).
We have to push back against the self-promoters, otherwise they will continue to ruin science literacy.
Hey Gendou,
For once we are completely like minds on this…
I think speculating ahead of peer review is fine (what i like to do)
but in the case of the vaccines it was as you say, backed by financial interests and did great harm to the world, resulting in the deaths of children who’s parents were afraid to immunize and psychological harm to parents who were told their childrens conditions were avoidable had they not been vaccinated…
I too hope NASA got it right, but have to say I smells like a PR stunt.
On the bondage sex in space… would this qualify as a fetish?
Maybe all it would take is a tightly confined space, like a double sided bunk?
Still, with the picture of astronauts gobbling floating droplets of tang out of the air in mind… it could get very messy!