What We're Reading

Here's just a few items to keep you busy over the weekend. Best wishes for the holiday season from all of us at NCSE.

• The North Carolina Town That's Scared of Solar Panels, Revisited, Vox, December 18, 2015 -- Dave Roberts re-examines the town which blocked a solar farm--one worry was reportedly that the panels would "suck up all the energy from the sun"--looking at the roots of NIMBYism and tools for overcoming it.
• This Ancient Femur Might Muddle Up Human Evolutionary History, Washington Post, December 21, 2015 -- Researchers found a femur in China that adds to the growing evidence that human relatives once thought long-extinct may have lived as recently as 10,000-20,000 years ago.
• How Science Education Can Save the World, Huffington Post, December 21, 2015 -- University of Massachusetts professor Scott Auerbach tells us how science education can help us save the world (and stop climate change). Hint: the answer involves rethinking how we approach science and mathematics with students.
• Animated Life: The Living Fossil Fish, The New York Times, December 22, 2015 -- This animated documentary covers the discovery of the so-called living fossil, the coelecanth, described here as "an awesome survivor and one of the biggest natural history surprises of the 20th century."
• A Deeper Confusion (PDF), Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2015 -- A detailed and informative review of two popular books about junk DNA--John Parrington's The Deeper Genome and Nessa Carey's Junk DNA--by Georgi K. Marinov, who worries that they are "guaranteed to only generate even deeper confusion."