Articles

Dennis Meredith: The Happy Chip

“Company XXX has recommendations for you based on items you purchased.…” Similar emails flood our inboxes daily. In his fifth novel, The Happy Chip, Dennis Meredith explores the impact of runaway data-grabbing. He imagines a ground-breaking nanochip people seeking to improve their lives have implanted in their bodies. The chip not only monitors behaviors, but also can control them surreptitiously. It’s 1984, a few decades on. Meredith’s non-fiction books include Explaining Research, a guidebook for scientists and science writers.

From ScienceWriters: Budget-beleaguered IRS isn't a paper tiger

Despite continuous cuts in IRS budgets and shrinking staffs, the agency remains able to deal with taxpayers who fail to file returns. Internal Revenue Code Section 6020 allows the IRS to complete returns and make assessments for taxes, penalties for failing to file, and for late payment of taxes and interest charges.

Bob Holmes: Flavor

My grandmother sprinkled salt on her grapefruit. As a child, I reached for the sugar. In Flavor: The Science of Our Most Neglected Sense, Bob Holmes explains why my grandmother made a wiser choice: salty tastes inhibit bitter ones. Most people, Holmes says, know little about the complex interplay of taste, smell, touch, sight, and even expectation that creates flavor sensations. We can learn to improve our everyday flavor experiences, however, Holmes asserts. It’s worth the effort, he says: “Paying attention to flavor makes life not just richer but deeper.”

Richard Harris: Rigor Mortis

When drugs deemed potentially useful for medical treatment in published research papers advance into pharmaceutical testing regimes, nine out of ten fail. That’s because the underlying science wasn’t rigorous, writes Richard Harris, long-time NPR science correspondent and NASW’s president in 1997-98. In Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions, Harris explores recent efforts to air and address the reproducibility crisis.

From ScienceWriters: New director at UC Santa Cruz

Veteran science journalist Erika Check Hayden, senior reporter for Nature and a longtime lecturer in the science communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, became the program’s third director in January. Check Hayden was selected by a committee of UCSC faculty and alumni after a national search. She succeeds current director Robert Irion, who is retiring from the university after leading the program for 10 years.

Shurkin: True Genius

As a 23-year-old postgraduate student working with Edward Teller in 1951, Richard Garwin came up with the design that led to the hydrogen bomb, Joel Shurkin reports. Outside of a small group in Los Alamos, however, Garwin’s role was completely unknown, Shurkin asserts in True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, The Most Influential Scientist You Never Heard of. Garwin’s other inventions include air traffic control systems and the first laser printer. Of the bomb, Shurkin notes, Garwin once said, “If I had a magic wand, I would make it go away.”

From ScienceWriters: Tax reporting for fellowship awards

Congratulations, you’ve been awarded a fellowship to the tune of $10,000. Don’t lose part of the largess by needlessly overpaying your self-employment tax. While you’re liable for income taxes on the $10,000, you’re not liable for self-employment taxes on the amount. How come? Because, like other writers, you aren’t in the business of receiving fellowships.

Williams: Seattle Walks

“Urban walking is simply the best way to get to know a place and to develop deeper connections to its story,” David Williams insists. In Seattle Walks, he provides 18 maps and 50 color illustrations for walks in his home town that take readers to such sites as a downtown building with dozens of carved faces, an unexpected Civil War cemetery, Seattle’s most infamous lost ship, and one of the city’s earliest houses of ill-repute. Seattle visitors and armchair travelers will enjoy tagging along.

Rochman: The Gene Machine

“Is genetic knowledge empowering or fear-inducing, or both? Will it heighten the anxieties of already hyper-anxious helicopter moms and dads, always waiting for the genetic shoe to drop? … Will it stress parents out or make them savvier?” — Bonnie Rochman poses these questions in The Gene Machine, as she explores not only present and potential advantages of genetic screening of fetuses and children, but also its drawbacks.

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