Welcome back! I hope you had a wonderful holiday, and put into practice Josh Rosenau's helpful advice if there was a monster at your Thanksgiving table. We've got a nice collection of articles for you this week, from tardigrades to koalas, and from Iraq to Miami to the halls of Congress. Enjoy!
- The Young Iraqis Promoting Evolutionary Theory and Rational Thought to Save Iraq, Niqash, January 10, 2015 (but still timely) -- Young Iraqis are working to save their country by, among other things, translating books about evolution and other sciences into Arabic. (Thanks to Salman Hameed for the link.)
- The Koala in the Coal Mine, TakePart, November 30, 2015 -- Koalas are outstandingly cute, but they're also outstandingly at risk from climate change, Todd Woody explains. (What about the drop bear, though?)
- The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood, by David Montgomery, BioLogos, December 1, 2015 -- Mark Harris of the University of Edinburgh contributes a thoughtful (if tardy) review of Montgomery's book. It is interesting to compare his reaction to NCSE's Steven Newton's take (PDF) in RNCSE in 2013. A sample (PDF) from the book is available on NCSE's website.
- The Genome of the Tardigrade Hypsibius dujardini, bioRxiv preprint, December 1, 2015 -- Contrary to a recent study (discussed in Tardigrades, World's Toughest Animals, Borrowed a Sixth of Their DNA from Microbes), Georgios Koutsovoulos and his colleagues report that they "do not find support for massive horizontal gene transfer" in tardigrades. "The great tragedy of Science--the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
- Steven Vogel, Biologist Who Studied How Things Move, Dies at 75, The New York Times, December 4, 2015 -- Sad news of the death of a professor at Duke University who was the founder of comparative biomechanics, the author of Cat's Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People, and Steve #63 of NCSE's Project Steve.
- Water as a Climate-Change Gut Punch in a City Defined by an Ocean, The New York Times, December 4, 2015 -- An artist brings sea level rise and climate change to Miami in a troubling, but gorgeous, performance art piece.
- Chief of House Science Panel Picks Battle Over Climate Paper, The New York Times, December 4, 2015 -- The Gray Lady is now covering Rep. Lamar Smith's (R-Texas) efforts to force scientists and government officials to turn over emails relating to a peer-reviewed paper published in Science. The paper definitively refutes climate change-deniers' favorite (and already discredited) claim that global warming has been on "pause" for 17 years. Read my posts about Smith's campaign here and the scientific community's reaction here.