MIT’s Science Journalism Tracker does it for you. Here’s a sample.
- Scientific American: The Top 10 Science Stories of 2011 ; #1 is Fukushima reactors and the quake-tsunami in general. That’s good. Most interesting is #2 – Technology (eg Twitter) and the Arab Spring. Baffling is #7, the death of Steve Jobs. A top story for sure. …
- Reuters – Kate Kelland: Whale sperm, orgasmic feet top 2011 bad science list ; Just dumb. Funny too.
- Wired: Top Scientific Discoveries of 2011 ; …first one up is the maybe-faster-than-light neutrinos, and last is Higgs boson. Right in the middle are Neanderthal genes that are a small component of non-African genomes, and the rise of world population to 7 billion.
- BBC: 2011 As Seen From Space ; Not science, strictly, but it includes the shot from the Int’l Space Station of the last reentry for the shuttle program, of the Atlantis and its crew.
Nature has an entire spread, including a round-up of “The 10 most important people of the year.“ MIT astronomer Sara Seager makes the list.
Seager wants to search for Earth-like planets no more than 30 parsecs away, close enough that their atmospheres could be studied. Her tool would be a 10 × 10 × 30-centimetre space telescope designed to watch a single star for a planetary transit. Such an ‘ExoplanetSat’ would not be able to analyse spectra by itself. For that, Seager will need an orbiting telescope such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder, an ambitious concept that NASA put on ice in 2006. But a fleet of ExoplanetSats could provide a resurrected planet finder with a map of where to look. Each ExoplanetSat would cost less than US$1 million. Rather than a telescope mirror, it would rely on a modified, $1,300 commercial lens. And dozens could be launched very cheaply, piggybacking on rockets carrying other missions.
She also worked on the inaugural show at the Museums of Science Boston’s rebuilt planetarium.
Listee John Rogers also has a Cambridge link. The MIT grad work on “electronic devices that can be worn rather than held — woven into clothes, say, or moulded to the body…. He found that ultra-thin silicon circuits printed onto an elastic surface could be highly flexible — and retain the benefits of silicon’s low cost and high performance. One result of this work is a spin-off company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called mc10, that is working with the sporting-goods giant Reebok to roll out a product in 2012 that.
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