In the News

NSA leaks forcing more official transparency

Trevor Timm wrote a piece for Freedom of the Press Foundation about how much more we're learning not just from the NSA leaks themselves, but from the response to those leaks. "Both companies and the government have been forced into a corner where their only move is to release more information they previously fought to keep secret," Trevor says. 

Dolphins on acid (and other bad ideas)

How dosing dolphins with LSD (and giving dolphins hand jobs) helped shape our modern pop culture beliefs about dolphins as sources of healing — beliefs that, according to neuroscientist Lori Marino, can endanger both dolphins and the humans who come to them for help. 

The chemical composition of "old book smell" 

It starts with lignin — a compound that makes up the cell walls of plants. Turns out, it's also closely related (chemical-structure-wise) to vanillin, the stuff that makes vanilla smell so vanilla-y. Given that books are full of the broken-down cell walls of trees, a big part of what we think of as "old book smell" is actually a scent similar to vanilla. 
 

New hybrid Australian language discovered

A new language has been discovered in a remote Indigenous community in northern Australia that is generated from a unique combination of elements from other languages. Light Warlpiri has been documented by University of Michigan [...]

Aspirin may fight cancer by slowing DNA damage

Aspirin is known to lower risk for some cancers, and a new study led by a UC San Francisco scientist points to a possible explanation, with the discovery that aspirin slows the accumulation of DNA [...]