The Scienceblogging Weekly (July 27th, 2012)

Scientific American – Sat, Jul 28, 2012 Blog of the Week:

Science Decoded is a wonderful mix of science, book reviews, and thoughts about the media, written by Erin Podolak, alumna of the University of Wisconsin program for Science Journalism, and now a science writer for The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

 

Top 10:

A Killer Without Regret by Deborah Blum:

In the summer of 1920, a 29-year-old son of Minnesota farmers docked his boat (acquired with stolen money) at a small island in New York City s East River. One by one he hired out-of-work sailors to crew for him. And one by one, he shot them in the head with a Colt .45 and dumped their bodies in the water. Before he was executed in 1930, Carl Panzram put the sailor body tally at 10 although he estimated that was only about half his total murder count. For all these things, I am not in the least sorry, he wrote in a jail house confessional. I was so full of hate that there was no room in me for such feelings as love, pity, kindness or honor or decency.

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The Scienceblogging Weekly (July 21th, 2012)

Scientific American – 11 hrs ago Blog of the Week:

Life is short, but snakes are long is written by Andrew Durso who is a PhD student at Utah State University, where he studies the behavior, physiology, and ecology of toad-eating snakes. So, everything on his blog is about snakes. And every post on his blog has something about snakes that you have not known before.

 

Top 10:

Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math by Bill McKibben:

If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven’t convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe

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