AL.com showcases some science that sets straight some old stereotypes. Southerners don’t have bigger guts than Americans from the North or the West. They just tell the truth when researchers ask:

The study recently published in the journal Obesity found that there’s a significantly higher percentage of obese people in a region of central and northwest states including [...]

SciAm blogger Clarissa Ai Ling Lee reflects on the science and art of visualizing information:

Of course, there were records of politics, observations of particular traditions, and stories of great wars and battles. However, the chronicling of agriculture, astronomy, architecture, engineering, medicine, and mathematics were the ones that contain some of the most interesting diagrammatic mappings, which perhaps grew [...]

Frida Polli, one of the financial folks at Forbes, is offering us a look at the sausage-factory of neuroscience funding:

In 2007, after 6 years of PhD work, I arrived at the McGovern Institute at MIT, a mecca for neuroscience research. Nobel laureates roamed the halls. Brilliant MIT undergrads competed to work in your lab. Crews from CBS showed [...]

Sounds unnatural or absurd, doesn’t it? But that’s what the internet is making possible, according to Nature (whose publishers should be a little worried). Researchers are signing on to the crowd-source philosophy of publishing journals without publishers:

The initiative, called the Episciences Project, hopes to show that researchers can organize the peer review and publication of their work at [...]

Remember Alan Alda’s quest to explain what a flame is so an 11-year-old would understand? He’s polled hundreds of elementary-school kids and is asking another question now. What is time?:

This year we asked kids to suggest questions. Many around the country asked: “What is time?” Some used exactly those words and others asked things like: How do you make [...]

Lost in Transcription’s “genetical book review” is a great idea executed well. Not a review of books as literature, but a review of the science in literature.

From the review of Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides:

There is a second case of inbreeding, however, that does contribute to Cal’s condition. Milt and his wife, Tessie, are second cousins, and each [...]

Boston Globe profiles the geneticist and Alzheimer’s expert who played organ on Aerosmith’s last album:

It was 2009 when Dr. Rudy Tanzi was asked to appear in a GQ magazine photo shoot for a campaign called “Rock Stars of Science.” The shoot, organized by the Geoffrey Beene Foundation, was aimed at raising awareness of scientific research by matching accomplished [...]

And let me tell you, Nature is none too pleased:

The meeting was unusually quick, and was followed by a press conference at which the Civil Protection Department and local authorities reassured the population, stating that minor shocks did not increase the risk of a major one.

According to the prosecutor, such reassurances led 29 victims who would otherwise have [...]

Fraud, reports Laboratory Equipment, is a growing problem in published research papers:

A review of retractions in medical and biological peer-reviewed journals finds the percentage of studies withdrawn because of fraud or suspected fraud has jumped substantially since the mid-1970s. In 1976, there were fewer than 10 fraud retractions for every 1 million studies published, compared with 96 retractions [...]