The Ed's Up #132

Coming to a screen near you (maybe) 

I'm delighted to announce that Tangled Bank Studios have optioned the rights to my upcoming book, I Contain Multitudes, and are developing a documentary adaptation! They're the company behind Neil Shubin's wonderful Your Inner Fish, so I feel that the project and the science will be in good hands. This isn't a certain deal; they still have to find a production company. But it's a first and necessary step, and I'm going to be intimately involved in these first development stages, and hopefully further. 
 

No, Wait, Short Conversations Really Can Reduce Prejudice

"That might seem eerily familiar because it’s the same punchline from one of the most infamous cases of scientific fraud in the last few years. In December 2014, political scientist Michael LaCour published a paper in which he supposedly evaluated the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s canvassers and found that they strongly and persistently reduced prejudices against same-sex marriage. Five months later, it turned out that his data was fabricated. His paper, exposed as a sham, was swiftly retracted. The scandal was a huge blow to the LGBT Center—but the new study, published in the same journal, offers redemption. Their methods do work. And in an extra twist, the vindicating results come from the same researchers who uncovered LaCour’s fraud." (Image: Pichi Chuang) 
 

The Scary Thing About a Virus That Kills Farmed Fish

"The mystery may be solved, but the threat isn’t over. Even before anyone knew it existed, TiLV had already spread around the world, triggering similar tilapia die-offs in Ecuador and Colombia. It’s also utterly unlike any virus that we know of, hinting at an entire world of related viruses that could potentially harm our food supplies. We should be deeply concerned about such threats, but we’re not. By contrast, diseases that affect us directly, such as swine flu, Ebola, and Zika, saturate our headlines, prompt panicked talks of pandemics, and intense quests to develop vaccines and cures. But diseases don’t need to infect humans to screw us over: They can also take out the plants and animals that we eat." (Image: Avi Eldar) 
 

What The Shrunken-Finger Illusion Reveals About the Brain

"There’s a popular and simple magic trick involving multiplying balls: The magician holds a ball, usually red, between her thumb and index finger. They flick their wrist and suddenly, a second ball appears between their index and middle fingers. The secret is simple: the first “ball” is really an empty hemispherical shell, with the second ball nesting inside it. When the magician flicks their wrist, they roll the second ball out of its shell. Audience members automatically assume that the empty shell is a full sphere, because it’s indistinguishable from one when viewed from the front. But there’s more to the trick than that." (Image: Eva Perls) 
 

Why Small Birds Opt For Urban Living

"A few years ago, Anders Pape Møller from the University of Paris-Sud walked through the small suburban town of Orsay, France, counting all the birds he saw or heard. He walked through built-up urban areas, and through forest and farmland. He found that Orsay’s birds were congregating largely in the urban zones. He found 77 percent of them within a hundred meters of the nearest house. When the repeated the census in a similar town in Denmark, he found the same thing: 87 percent of local birds were sticking close to humans." (Image: Vogelartinfo) 

More good reads

• A historian of EVE Online reflects on the largest video-game war ever fought. This is amazingly interesting. By Robinson Meyer
• A tale about filming snow leopards, to get you excited for Planet Earth 2, coming in October.
• Rose Eveleth’s choose-your-own-adventure game about AI is wonderful.
• How much of a threat is ocean garbage, really? Elizabeth Preston investigates.
• The brain that wasn't supposed to heal. By Apoorva Mandavilli
• Why do we think nature sounds soothing? Because of a man named Irv Teibel. By Cara Giaimo
• Megan Garber on the tragedy of April Fool’s Day
• This Woman Says Her 2-Year-Old Died Because Of A False DNA Test. Stephanie Lee reports.
• Wonderful minimalist animations of animal mating; some of these are so spot-on
• Marvel at David Quammen's three-part opus on Yellowstone
• Robert Krulwich on a weird tree locked in battle with giant animal. Don't miss the wonderful photo at the end.
• I'm on Radiolab, talking with Nick Lane about the singular origin of eukaryotic cells. (Here’s more on the ideas, and how they differ from what people traditionally think about endosymbiosis.) 

You can also follow me on Twitter or find my writing at The Atlantic or on my blog. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you can sign up yourself.

And that's it! Thanks for reading.

-Ed