Coffee Break Science Browsing

What I would have been reading over coffee in the lab, if I actually drank coffee in the lab (and of course I scrupulously follow the university Environmental Health&Safety rules and never drink coffee in the lab):

At spiked, a review of Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality:

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann believes that ‘Bohr brainwashed a whole generation of physicists...

The Scientist has an excerpt from a book arguing that the newest biological weapon of mass destruction will be... entomological. If you hate roaches, you'll really hate cyborg roaches.

Online academic journals - they give researchers what they want. And what do researchers want?

What they want is an article that can be treated uncritically and have a big impact.

As a former Star Wars addict, I'm glad to know that

The first serious battlefield ray gun is now being deployed.

This story is a little old, but a visiting seminar speaker yesterday has been involved in studying a 90.7-metric ton fungus in Oregon. It's the largest organism on earth.

On the technical side of things:

Science has a special feature on the genetics of behavior. Will genomics make human behavioral genetics truly a subdiscipline of genetics? Because without genotyping to ground them, human behavioral studies are frankly too difficult to control in order to draw proper genetic conclusions - it's neither forward nor reverse genetics.

This should be at least one cup of coffee's worth of reading material.

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