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This week Zach and Kelly talk to Dr. Jennifer Sheridan about her research on the impacts of oil palm farming on amphibian populations in Borneo.

You can support Jen’s research through the #SciFund Challenge here!

LINKS

The Impact of Oil Palm in Borneo

Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems (SAFE) Project: Collaboration between Sime Darby (the oil palm company) and scientists to determine best practices for oil palm farming

Tropical Conservation and Development: Jen’s SciFund Project

UN-REDD: The United Nations Collaborative Program on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries

E-mail Dr. Sheridan at: jennifer.a.sheridan(at)ua.edu

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This week Zach and Kelly interview Dr. Sanna Sokolow, a post-doc in UCSB’s Ecological Parasitology Lab and Projet Crevette scientist. Sanna talks about her research on the use of freshwater prawns to control schistosomiasis in West Africa.

You can support Project Crevette through the SciFund Challenge here.

Subscribe to The Weekly Weinersmith on iTunes here.

LINKS

Schistosomiasis

Projet Crevette

Biocontrol

Projet Crevette’s SciFund video proposal:

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This week Zach and Kelly take a break due to ROFLCon and field work, respectively. Instead of a new Weekly Weinersmith episode, we present to you Zach’s appearance on our sister’s podcast, The Titanium Physicists!

You can subscribe to The Titanium Physicists on iTunes by following this link.

See you next week!

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This week Zach and Kelly talk about the surprising lack of scientific evidence supporting the lifestyle changes suggested by doctors to people with gastroesophageal reflux disease (AKA acid reflux disease). Elizabeth Iorn’s blog post on Science Exchange starts a discussion on the importance of reproducibility in scientific research, and factors explaining the recent rise in retractions of scientific articles.

Links

Zach at ROFLCon (solo and Super Art Fight)

Kelly is awarded an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship!

Zach and I will be the Chartists in Residence over at I Love Charts on May 1!

Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease (GERD)

Gastroesaphageal Reflux Disease

Scientific article: Are lifestyle measures effective in patients with gastroesophageal reflux disease? An evidence-based approach

WebMD: Top 10 Heartburn Food Triggers and Lifestyle Modifications for GERD

Scientific Misconduct

Dr. Elizabeth Iorns on scientific misconduct and how Science Exchange might improve scientific reproducibility

New York Times article on scientific misconduct

Dr. Iorn’s response to NYT article

Weekly Weinersmith Episode 16: Science Exchange and Dr. Elizabeth Iorns

Article on the importance of sharing computer source code: Shining Light into Black Boxes

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Kelly and Zach talk to MIT’s Dr. Bruce Lipschultz and Daniel Brunner about fusion, Alcator C-Mod, and the future of fusion research in the United States.

LINKS

ROFLcon – May 4th and 5th in Cambridge, MA

Fission and nuclear power

Plasma

Fusion

Tokamak

Magnetized target fusion

Fusion start-ups

Tri Alpha

General Fusion

Polywell fusion

Cold Fusion

International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)

FusionFuture.org - sign the petition to save Alcator C-Mod!

Show correction: The amount of energy gained in fusion verses fission was stated incorrectly. The ‘energy per nucleon’ is ~ 10x larger in fusion than for fission. For more information, visit this site.

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This week Kelly and Zach talk to Dr. Michael Munger about Chilean politics, modeling in economics, and areas where economists and the general public tend to disagree.

LINKS

EconTalk-An excellent economics podcast on which Dr. Munger is a regular guest.

Chicago school

Confucianism

Agent-based modeling

NYTimes Room for Debate on modeling and the future of economics

Dr. Nassim Taleb and The Black Swan

Logical positivism

Wing walking

Solyndra

Price gouging

EconTalk episode on price gouging with Dr. Munger

Blog post by Dr. Munger on price gouging

Rent control

Externalities

Dr. Munger was also involved in the popular EconStories videos which used rap to explain Keynesian and Hayekian economics. In the first video you can find Dr. Munger driving the limo, in the second he is the guard at the door. Enjoy!

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This week Zach and Kelly talk about nodding disease and a simulation looking at the potential for transfer of life between planets.

LINKS

Topic 1: Nodding Disease

Nodding disease

CNN’s coverage (includes video)

Onchocerca vovlulus

Filariasis

River blindness

Kuru

Prion

Topic 2: Could planet d transfer life to nearby planets?

Science Daily article

Poster presentation on simulation

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Zach and Kelly discuss another amazing case of horizontal gene transfer, and a study exploring whether winners or losers are more aggressive.

LINKS

SciFund Challenge

Paper 1: Adaptive horizontal transfer of a bacterial gene to an invasive insect pest of coffee 

Popular press article

Coffee berry borer beetle

Transposon

Paper 2: Are people more aggressive when they are worse off or better off than others? 

Popular press article