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  • Autism

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    1–2 minutes

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    Planet Autism – a moving article at Salon on the realities of living with an autistic child; it’s not all Rain Man. The related MetaFilter thread has a comment from a parent about his experience with his autistic son.

  • What Galileo Saw

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    What Galileo Saw – the New Yorker has a compelling account of the legacy of NASA’s Galileo deep space probe. The article describes the almost fatal problem the probe encountered in transit and the heroic effort of NASA scientists to try and salvage the mission, as well as the unparalleled discoveries it made at Jupiter.

  • The Death of Cyber

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    3–4 minutes

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    I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the lack of quality of writing in newspapers these days, and specifically, newspaper supplements. I have no problem with the main reporting, but the ‘lifestyle’ sections are just awful. Maybe they’ve always been this dull and boring, or maybe my standards have been risen by culling the best of the…

  • GM Spin

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    I posted a comment in this MetaFilter thread about GM crops, on how research in the area is often misrepresented by the anti-GM lobby. Case in point: it was claimed that the Bt toxin pesticide might actually benefit some pests, meaning that transgenic Bt plants could be utterly counterproductive. In reality, the research data has…

  • Scare Waves

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    3–5 minutes

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    3 comments on Scare Waves

    A lot of people are getting angry and scared about new mobile phone masts being erected in their local areas; the vast majority of these masts are for 3G operations, which have a smaller coverage area than current mobile phone masts. People don’t like the masts because they think they might be harmful to their…

  • A Love of Memory

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    6–9 minutes

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    Why Kim Stanley Robinson loves the science of memory

  • Lack of imagination

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    1 comment on Lack of imagination

    Once again we are at that special time of year when the GCSE and A-Level results are announced for secondary school students here in the UK. There’s almost no point reading the newspapers since they always run the same stories. If the results for an exam improve, that’s because it’s getting easier. If they get…

  • Intelligence enhancing drugs

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    Creatine ‘boosts brain power’ perhaps by regulating brain energy levels. Since meat is a source of creatine, it’s not known whether meat-eaters could actually gain any intelligence advantage by taking supplementary creatine, but along with modafinil it’s yet another step along the road to the widespread use of intelligence enhancing drugs.

  • Lucid

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    3 comments on Lucid

    I arrived back in the UK yesterday morning after a 24 hour journey from Sydney. Predictably, it was raining. What I tried to do during the flights back home was to time my eating and sleeping so that I could reduce any jetlag I’d have caused by the ten hour time difference. The easiest way…

  • Recursive

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    2–3 minutes

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    During dinner yesterday, I mentioned to Andrew Paul and The Official Bear Of The Third Millennium that I’d recently had an MRI scan done of my brain. Someone then said how strange it must be to see the activity of your brain in real time. I was just in the middle of replying that the…