Stories by Christopher Mims

Busted: PR Flacks who ran afoul of the science blogosphere, including a brand new flack for Stuart Pivar who showed up right here on this blog

Not that anyone should care about the attempt by New York businessman Stuart Pivar to sue prominent science blogger PZ Myers of Pharyngula anymore, since the suit was just dismissed, but I just noticed that two of the pro-Pivar comments* on the original post in which I broke the PZ/Pivar story were by a "Matthew Richards," who claims to be an attorney...

August 31, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

WIRED scoops Scientific American on SciAm's own birthday -- happy 162nd to us!

Put up ya lighters, raise a glass of Henny, empty a clip into the night sky -- whatever it is you do when you want to party like it's 2999, 'cause the magazine that predates the American civil war, the only extant publication that used to run its own patent service, the joint that has played host to every great mind from Mark Twain to Albert Einstein to Tim Berners-Lee -- is celebrating its 162nd birthday...

August 28, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Evolution

This week in censoring scientific discourse via the legal system, Harun Yahya edition

A good way to convince people your opponents are wrong is to put a red 'X' through a cheesy and outdated depiction of one of their central hypotheses--and then write FALSE next to it.

August 21, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Health

A critique of our article on racial medicine from Roger Masters of Dartmouth

From Scientific American editor Gary Stix : The August issue of Scientific American included an article entitled "Race in a Bottle," by Jonathan Kahn, which portrays the development of BiDil, the first "ethnic" drug...

August 20, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

PZ Myers, ScienceBlogs.com's lead blogger, is being sued for libel

Talk about hot off the wires, the following was filed last Thursday, and if the lack of discussion of it on the usually endlessly self-examining ScienceBlogs is any indication, no one there has any idea about it either...

August 20, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

New 'Mind' exhibit at San Francisco's Exploratorium science museum proves interesting

Sip of Conflict copyright 2007 Exploratorium | Photo: Amy Snyder And by interesting I mean hideously violational (not a word) of preconceived notions about, in this case, consumption and excretion, or the boundaries between clean and dirty...

August 17, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Evolution

Weaponized BlackBerry

credit: Lyric Rosatti When scientists and science-fiction writers think about the unintended consequences of new technology, they tend to obsess about the far-out what-ifs: "What if the internet turns us into a world of shut-ins?...

August 16, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

Who knew the Bible could predict the size of the universe?

Everyone knows that Young Earth Creationism has firmly established that the age of the universe is approximately 6,000 years, as illuminated by the obviously-better-than-radio-carbon-dating method of counting all the begats in the Good Book...

August 13, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

Men average more sexual partners than women, right? Wrong.

Surveys consistently report that men in the U.S. population average seven sexual partners, while women average four. Everyone assumes men are cads and women are out to protect their virtue, so this makes perfect sense, except.....

August 13, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Health

Kids prefer carrots that come out of McDonald's bags... even though McDonald's doesn't sell carrots

As Steve Mirsky reports in today's 60 Second Science podcast (which you can listen to here -- it will literally only take a minute), preschoolers -- that's 3 to 5 year olds -- consistently reported that food tasted better when it was presented to them in a McDonald's rather than a plain paper bag...

August 7, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

Are Transgenic Crops Safe to Grow and Eat?

In the September issue of Scientific American, which should be arriving on newsstands and in subscribers in-boxes right about now, there is a totally awesome and, sadly, totally paywalled article entitled Sowing a Gene Revolution: A new green revolution based on genetically modified crops can help reduce poverty and hunger--but only if formidable institutional challenges are met...

August 7, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

TurtleNet - Connecting turtles wirelessly

"We are currently investigating methods to use DTNs, energy management, and programming languages to improve the state of the art in tracking small, mobile wildlife." --TurtleNet Mark D...

August 7, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Meraki's Guerilla Wi-Fi to Put a Billion More People Online

Like some kind of techno-utopian Johnny Appleseed, a start-up called Meraki wants to cover the earth with ad hoc Wi-Fi networks

August 6, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Environment

Rush shilling for General Motors' new "green" autos... Yay?

We all know that Rush Limbaugh--global warming skeptic, proud owner of multiple SUVs--has been ridin' dirty for as long as he's been on the radio. So it's no surprise that large swaths of the blogosphere find it highly ironic that Rush did an ad for GM in which he talks about how much he loves him some GM SUVs, and without missing a beat, touts GM's forward-thinking, environmentally friendly practices...

August 2, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Environment

Are taxpayers going to foot the bill for disasters brought about by by climate change and runaway development?

That's a trick question -- they already are. As Victoria Schlesigner and Meredith Knight reported in a just-posted expose for Scientific American -- Insurers Claim Global Warming Makes Some Regions Too Hot to Handle -- insurers are dumping coverage of those who may be in the path of global-warming-supercharged storms and rising sea levels...

August 2, 2007 — Christopher Mims

Environment

Thing that reminds us of global warming (of the day) -- photo gallery

The full title should be "Thing that reminds us of global warming, but, like all individual weather phenomena, can't be proved to be directly linked to it on account of the overwhelming complexity of the Earth's climactic system, which manifests itself in seemingly random (when localized) temperature, rainfall, and windspeed variations--a photo gallery (of the day)" but that wouldn't fit...

August 1, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

Life beneath the Antarctic: stunning images

>> Life Beneath Antarctic Ice | Time (from the book Under Antarctic Ice by Norbert Wu and Jim Mastro)

July 31, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

World's greatest mathematicians can't calculate restaurant tips, either

...as dinner winds down, George Csordas, a distinguished-looking functions theorist from the University of Hawaii, confesses that he never balances his checkbook.

July 30, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

In 12 million years, we're dead

I know there are disasters just over the horizon--terrorism, climate change, the rapture--but some ends to the human race are so profoundly unavoidable that they deserve further scrutiny, even if it's just to satisfy my need for some kind of secular eschatology...

July 26, 2007 — Christopher Mims

The Sciences

When being wealthy means being sick

cc Malias Generally health outcomes are better for the wealthy--they tend to be better educated and have access to healthcare and higher-quality food.

July 24, 2007 — Christopher Mims