Graycen and Alison share some stories they read and enjoyed this week, including: deadly hippo poop! A soap-operatic biotechnology start-up! And a Wikipedia citation analysis! Next they talk to Izzy Aguiar about her work making mathematics more human, and more delightful. Listen here or subscribe on iTunes!
Alison’s story about the perils of hippopotamus excrement was based on this piece by Ed Yong for The Atlantic. If you want to learn more about that story, you can read the original study from Christopher Dutton, Amanda Subalusky, et al. in Nature Communications. Ed Yong’s piece about how useful dead wildebeests are can be found here.
There is no shortage of great reporting on the Theranos debacle. Graycen got much of her information from a Vanity Fair piece by Nick Bilton, which provides excellent context for the rise and fall of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. She also read a recent article by John Carreyrou, who in 2015 broke the story about Theranos’ problems with their blood testing platform in The Wall Street Journal.
We were inspired by Matt Miller’s analysis of sources cited on Wikipedia, so: Exactly 12.5% of our total works cited this week is comprised of this Nature article by Giorgia Guglielmi. Another 12.5% is this piece by Christina Lohr on how Wikipedia influences the language used in scientific publications.
Buffs Talk Science 