What do dogs dream of? How much sleep do we need? Find out in our October 9-15 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• Brain scans show dogs learn when sleeping—just like people by Virginia Morrell at Science
• Are you awake to sleep deprivation? by James Brown at The Biochemist
• Podcast of the week part one: Stimulating Research on the Mechanisms of Memory and Applications of Memory Modulation - Dr. Steve Ramirez by Marie McNeely at People Behind the Science Podcast
• Are Space, Time, And Gravity All Just Illusions? by Ethan Siegel at Starts With A Bang!
• Half the universe’s missing matter has just been finally found by Leah Crane at New Scientist
• Two Black Holes Made a Mega Black Hole! by Crystal Riley at Sciworthy
• Earth’s Tectonic Plates Are Weaker Than Once Thought, According to Research by Penn Geologists by Katherine Unger Baillie at Penn News
• Will Italy's Ominous Supervolcano Erupt Soon? by Barbie Latza Nadeau at Scientific American
• Scientists See Climate Change in California's Wildfires by Debra Kahn and Anne C. Mulkern at Scientific American
• Where’s the lettuce? Food, Brexit, & Climate Change by Emily May Armstrong at The Radical Botanical
• Here's why your sustainable tuna is also unsustainable by Megan Bailey at The Conversation
• The Value of Birds in Colombia’s Post-Conflict World by R. Scott Winton and Natalia Ocampo Peñuela at National Geographic Voices for Biodiversity
• Podcast of the week part two: Sooty birds by Bob Hirshon and Suzanne Bard at Science Update
• Google's New Earbuds Auto-Translate 40 Languages Thanks to Machine Learning by Daniel Nelson at Science Trends
• Band Gaps, Made to Order by James Badham at The University of California Santa Barbara Current

Check back next week for more great picks!

What has inter-species sex done to us? How will Earth end? Find out in our October 2-8 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• A distant relation was likely responsible for humans’ susceptibility to genital herpes by Andrew Masterson at Cosmos Magazine
• Dream Loss - Sleep Deprivation Is Causing A Hidden Epidemic by Bruce B. Vanderburg at Reliawire
• Will a vegetarian diet during pregnancy drive your child to drugs and drink? by Sharon Begley at STAT News
• The Four Ways The Earth Will Actually End by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• Gravitational Waves Catch 2017 Nobel by Steven Skolnick at Physics Central
• Circadian Rhythms, Illustrated by Jen Christiansen at Scientific American
• Once Again, No Female Nobel Winners in Science by Christophe André at Scientific American
• The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – Studying molecules with cryo-electron microscopy by Andy Brunning at Compound Interest







The Unassuming Crayfish—and Its Path of Devastation by Jason Bittel at NRDC On Earth
An overlooked ecosystem: garbage dumps by Brandon Keim at Anthropocene
1.5ºC: Geophysically impossible or not? by Ben Sanderson at RealClimate

Check back next week for more great picks!

What's behind Alzheimer's? What controls appetite? Find out in our September 25-October 1 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

By Compound Interest, used under Creative Commons licence.

• New Alzheimer’s Study Sheds Light on the Mysterious Tau Protein by Maya Gosztyla at AlzScience
• The Frenemy Inside You: tales of bacterial cooperation and collusion by Maya Emmons-Bell at Equilibria
• In The Future, The Best Solution To Cavities Might Be A Vaccine by Mohendra Shiwnarain at Science Trends
• Researchers Identify Brain Cells that Control Our Appetite at Sci-News.com
• The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm
• A Journey With Jellyfish: Understanding Sleep In Brainless Animals by Michael Abrams at Science Trends
• The chemistry of poisonous frogs, and how they avoid poisoning themselves by Andy Brunning at Compound Interest
• Logging Industry Needs to Face the Facts on Boreal Caribou by Anthony Swift and Jen Skene at NRDC Expert Blog
• Birds of a Feather Hunt Better Together by Christie Wilcox at Science Sushi
• Huge space rocks could have helped start Earth’s plate tectonics by Michael Marshall at New Scientist
• Recovery: A tale of three hurricanes by William Hooke at Living on the Real World
• Five questions you were too embarrassed to ask about the expanding universe and The Big Bang Wasn’t The Beginning, After All by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• The Last Woman to Win a Physics Nobel by Elizabeth Landau at Scientific American
• The Real Problem With Voice Assistants Like Siri Is Your Brain by Robbie Gondalez at Wired
• Who cares that we no longer have privacy? by Ransom Stephens at The Measure of Things
• Researchers Learn How Ketamine Acts on the Brain by Rick Nauert at PsychCentral
• The Psychology of Taking a Knee by Jeremy Adam Smith and Dacher Keltner at Scientific American
• Suicidal tendencies hard to spot in some people with autism by Katherine Gotham at Spectrum
• What Germany’s election results mean for science by Quirin Schiermeier and Alison Abbott at Nature

Check back next week for more great picks!

Five tips on using science to live a better, healthier life

Image credit Thomas_H_photo, used via Flickr CC BY-ND 2.0 licence

You have just woken up. You check your phone and have a look at the news. What do you see? Most days, a key headline will have something to do with science – and with good reason. We live in what many consider a golden age of discovery. Science is making advances we never thought possible and is helping us work out problems we never thought could be solved. We can look for water in outer space, use light-activated nanoparticles to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria and use drugs to correct errors in our DNA to fend off deadly genetic diseases.

However, that’s only one side of the coin. At least half of the science news seems to be urgently pointing at a new problem. Just over the past few weeks, even the most casual news-readers could have found themselves worrying about involuntarily increasing their risk of getting breast or lung cancer by doing apparently healthy things like going outside and taking vitamins. You may have been stressing about compromising your heart’s health by sitting too much or being too tall. And that’s before you’ve even gotten out of bed!

So how can you use science to make more informed decisions? Here are a few pointers to empower you to make a change.

Why Mexico had quakes, diet & inflammation, & virus-laden semen, in our September 18-24 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• What’s going on beneath Mexico? by Daniel García at Mapping Ignorance 
• Why the Mexico City Earthquake Shook Up Disaster Predictions by Eric Vance at Scientific American
• Can your diet reduce inflammation? by Richard V. Miller at The Biochemist
• Podcast of the week: Why Do Dinosaurs Matter? by Katie Hiler at Science Friday
• Human semen can host up to 27 different viruses by Karl Gruber at Science Magazine
• This Is Why Science Loves Twins by Jeffrey and Thomas Delviscio at Stat News
• As care shifts from hospital to home, families try to guard against infection by Melissa Bailey at STAT News 
• The Hydrogen Bomb: Future of Atomic Bombs by Ninad Kumbhojkar at Perk Science
• The Influence of Animal Age in Behavioral Testing at Maze Engineers
• A TSP Breakthrough by Dick Lipton at Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP 

Check back next week for more great picks!

What's in our tap water and babies' teething tablets? Find out in our September 11-17 2017 #sciseekpicks #scicomm

Each week, the ScienceSeeker editors pick their favourite posts within their respective areas of interest and expertise. Here is a round-up of the Science Seeker Editors’ Selections for the past week:

• Cassini's Grand Finale by Lee Billings and Mike Lemonick at Scientific American
• Last Days of Cassini: An Insider's Story by Corey S Powell at Out There
• It's Time for a 21st Century Hurricane Scale by Dan Satterfield at Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal 
• Wildlife Photographer of the Year at the Natural History Museum

Great photography via Natural History Museum

• The Plan to Clone an Extinct Horse by Stacey McKenna at Hakai Magazine
• Renewable energy flooring takes a step forward at Union South by Will Cushman at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• If NYC subways obeyed quantum maths trains wouldn’t be delayed by Mark Kim at New Scientist
• If you're drinking tap water, you're consuming plastic pollutants by Dan Morrison and Christopher Tyree at PRI
• Flu vaccine causes miscarriages – the real evidence says otherwise at Skeptical Raptor 
• Warning Letter of the Week: poisoning infants edition at Chemjobber
• The Terrifying Physics Of How Wildfires Spread So Fast by Ethan Siegel at Starts With a Bang!
• Solidarity in Sobriety by C Mellor at Science For The Common Man 
• Good as Gold by Sonia Fernandez at The University of Santa Barbara Current
• What currently widely-accepted scientific practices will someday be seen as unethical? by Jeremy Fox at Dynamic Ecology
• Math: Still Not Everywhere by Michael J. Barany at mathbabe
• Putting a price tag on the flood-reducing value of wetlands by Brandon Keim at Anthropocene

Check back next week for more great picks!

Do your research! Six ways to find science you can trust online

by Gaia Cantelli, PhD

Credit: Tim Abbott, used via CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 License

If you wanted to know more about a medical condition would you take a trip to the library and pore over medical textbooks? Of course not, you’d look it up on your phone while you’re still in your doctor’s waiting room.

Looking up things online is essentially second nature for most of us – but do you ever worry if you can trust what you find? Most of us get all our information from the Internet – and science and medicine have been made far more accessible by the Internet and mobile phones. It’s incredibly convenient, but it is also a minefield of potential misinformation, misunderstanding and, even worse, fraud. How can we know if we can trust what we see online? Here are some of my best pointers to use this amazing resource to obtain reliable and relevant information – especially when it comes to science and medicine.