A real-life network of scientists, policymakers and journalists linked to stem cell research recently found itself cloned on social networking site Facebook. The originals had no control over the profiles, which used their names and photos and which hijacked their real friends in what’s called a sybil attack. Find out more in my news story, online ahead of next week’s print edition.
A former NASA collaborator has just published a new analysis of his copy of Apollo-era data–NASA lost the originals–from a lunar dust experiment. I reported in an online news story that NASA archivists are trying to recover other Apollo data, too, in advance of the next moon missions.
Earthquake scientists have created some pretty awesome -looking images of the Italian region hit by an earthquake earlier this month. Nature printed [html] one this week, based on my blog post last week. I also blogged about animal researchers who protested violence against them at UCLA and about a TV documentary on controversial human cloning attempts. And while I was covering controversy, I blogged about allegations that Jared Diamond defamed a pair of feuding New Guinean men in a New Yorker article.
A new analysis based on an Apollo scientist’s copies of lost NASA data seeks to determine how sticky, abrasive moon dust will affect lengthier future lunar missions.
The author of the new study, Brian O’Brien, was the principal investigator for the dust detectors left behind in 1969 by the first two manned missions to the Moon, Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. At the time, O’Brien was a professor of space science at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Continue reading Apollo scientist dusts off ‘lost’ lunar data→
In September 2008, Forbes science editor Matthew Herper and former Washington Post reporter Rick Weiss appeared together on a panel at the World Stem Cell Summit in Madison, Wisconsin. In late February, Herper received an invitation to ‘friend’ Weiss on the Internet social-networking site Facebook. On the basis of their acquaintance, Herper accepted, noticing that a number of other people involved with stem cells were listed as friends on Weiss’s profile. However, that profile — and many of those it was linked to — was a fake. Continue reading Fake Facebook pages spin web of deceit→
Victor Hess first discovered cosmic rays using a Geiger counter and a hot air balloon in 1911. Today physicists are using hundreds of giant water tanks scattered across the Argentine pampas to try to figure out where the mysterious particles come from, I learned in an interview for this week’s Nature’spodcast. Here’s the podcast [mp3], or see a transcript [html].
I also wrote a news story this week about an experiment in which writing short essays about their personal values helped low-performing African-Americans to improve their performance and attitudes towards school for the next two years. And I blogged about claims that genetically-modified crops do not actually improve yields, the first images taken by the planet-hunting space telescope Kepler, and new satellite imagery of the effects of the L’Aquila earthquake in Italy earlier this month.
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
A real-life network of scientists, policymakers and journalists linked to stem cell research recently found itself cloned on social networking site Facebook. The originals had no control over the profiles, which used their names and photos and which hijacked their real friends in what’s called a sybil attack. Find out more in my news story, online ahead of next week’s print edition.
Victor Hess first discovered cosmic rays using a Geiger counter and a hot air balloon in 1911. Today physicists are using hundreds of giant water tanks scattered across the Argentine pampas to try to figure out where the mysterious particles come from, I learned in an interview for this week’s Nature’s