This has been quite the week. From the overwhelming to the fascinating to the touching, here’s what I’ve found worth reading:
Graham Readfearn reports for the Guardian on the unbelievably tragic 93% of the Great Barrier Reef impacted by coral bleaching.
Coral bleaching. Photo: howfardad/Flickr
Pacific Standard reports on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s work to protect endangered species, and mentions some of our suggestions for improving the process: putting “nerdy little angels on FWS’s burdened bureaucratic shoulder” (their most excellent words).
Slate details an example of politics getting in the way of telling a scientific story: the CDC’s failure to identify the troubling origin of the cholera epidemic that raged in the wake of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. NPR has more on who’s being sued as a result.
My colleague Pallavi Phartiyal connects the dots between attacks on researchers who use fetal tissue and other scientists whose work is dragged into political fights.
The American Physical Society did a study on the climate for LGBT physicists and found that there is a lot of work to be done to make physics more welcoming. More on that soon in a longer post.
The American Geophysical Union couldn’t find any evidence that Exxon Mobil is currently supporting climate change misinformation, so they decided to keep taking money from the company. They must not have looked very hard. In related news, the American Petroleum Institute warned the oil industry about climate change…in 1968.
And then Berkeley Breathed, who returned this year to create the great strip Bloom County again, drew this moving tribute to Prince. Art, and creative gender expression, lives on.