Highlights from AAAS: More great stuff from around the Web

The hills are alive with the sounds of science! I've found lots of fascinating stories based on the lectures and panel discussions from last week's American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. In this post, I've linked to a bunch I think you'll really enjoy. If there's great stuff that I missed, mention it in the comments!

The image above comes from a line of truly awesome T-shirts that make me wish AAAS was the sort of casual event where I could wear a T-shirt and not look like a slacker.

•New Scientist: Religion, society, and the hunt for extra-terrestrial life

•Time: The Natural Debt Crisis: Learning to live within our means

•The Guardian: Seaweed as a source of new malaria drugs

•Uncertain Principles blog: Fracking Annoying—a tone-deaf panel on natural gas drilling

•80 Beats blog: Bilingual brains resist dementia

•The Forum on Science, Ethics, and Policy: A panel on the benefits and detriment of GM crop regulations

•NASA: Cleaning up black carbon and methane to reduce short-term impacts of climate change

•The Guardian: Mice engineered to help us understand why humans stutter

•The Guardian: Bears in Space—How scientists are applying the lessons of hibernation to humans

•CNN: Better than a 3-D printer—Printing skin onto open wounds

•Discovery News: Scientists stand up for animal testing

•Baltimore Science News Examiner: Using gaming to teach people about the risks of climate change

•Science News: Climate-specific genetics

•Scientific American: How many people can the Earth really support?

•Science magazine: Transcript of a live conversation with robotics researchers

•Scientific American: Why are Americans so ill-informed on the topic of climate change?

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. She writes a monthly column for The New York Times Magazine and is the author of Before the Lights Go Out, a book about electricity, infrastructure, and the future of energy. You can find Maggie on Twitter and Facebook.

Maggie goes places and talks to people. Find out where she'll be speaking next.

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Anonymous

Ha! I’m wearing that same shirt right now. sweeeet, I’m a nerd!
Anonymous

Thanks for the mention, from your Baltimore Science News Examiner!
maryn

They also make these, which may be my favorite of all my Tshirts, (except possibly for the one with Shakespeare saying “Prose, Not Hos”):
http://controversy.wearscience.com/design/devil/
jtf

I found the blog post about “tone-deaf” fracking panel presentations to be pretty tone-deaf as well. The fact that some sloppily run drilling operations resulted in some pretty bad stuff happening notwithstanding, I had a hard time reading something that judgmental.
Ubuntourist

Though only peripherally related to this thread, it may be of interest to folks on the “Wrong Coast” near Brain-Washington, DC: The Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS) has just started the DC Art Science Evening Rendevous (DASER), modeled after San Francisco’s Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER). Details at:

CPNAS: http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=cpnas_home
DASER: http://www.nasonline.org/site/PageServer?pagename=Experience_Future_Events_DASER
Sarah

Cake Hero did an awesome cake version of that T-shirt design: http://melissacakeytime.blogspot.com/2010/01/science.html
billstewart

You can always wear the t-shirt with a suit jacket on top; it’s close enough to non-slacker for a conference full of scientists who’ve mostly dressed up for the occasion also.
Crashproof

I have that shirt. Of all my science-geek t-shirts, that one is the bestest.. though the Torso-Friendly Hadron Collider is up there pretty far too.
Anonymous

I recently judged a county-wide elementary school science fair while wearing this awesome tee.
Maggie Koerth-Baker

Sadly, they don’t really make that look for ladies.