The Ed's Up #187
That Time the TSA Found a Scientist’s 3-D-Printed Mouse Penis
(and other amusing tales of the intersection between science and airport security)
"The model is 15 centimeters long, made of clear translucent plastic, and indisputably phallic— like the dismembered member of some monstrous, transparent, 11-foot rodent. One of Cohn’s colleagues had already been questioned about it when she carried it on an outward flight from Gainesville to Washington D.C. She put it through the security scanner, and the bag got pulled. A TSA official looked inside, winked at her, and let her go. She was amused but embarrassed, so Cohn offered to take the model home on the return flight. Once again, the bag was pulled. A TSA officer asked if Cohn had anything sharp or fragile inside. Yes, he said, some 3-D-printed anatomical models. They’re pretty fragile. The officer pulled out two models of mouse embryos, nodded to herself, and moved on. “And then,” Cohn recalls, “she pulled out this mouse penis by its base, like it was Excalibur.” (Image: Martin J Cohn)
Why Flamingos Are More Stable on One Leg Than Two
"Chang grabbed the dead bird by its shin and held it upright—and the leg snapped into place, becoming rigid and unyielding. The flamingo looked almost like it was sleeping—one leg extended, the other bent, and the head tucked back into its feathers. And Chang probably looked like a fever-dream version of Mary Poppins, holding a dead flamingo aloft like the world’s unlikeliest umbrella. “It was a lightbulb moment,” he says. “We weren’t expecting it to be stable, but it totally was." (Image: Hannibal Hanschke) 
Why Did the Biggest Whales Get So Big?
"But for Pyenson, the secret to really understanding why the baleen whales got so big is to really nail down when they got so big. And more importantly, when did they get really big? The sheer size of the baleen whales can distract us from the fact that some are much bigger than others—there’s a considerable difference between a 20-foot minke and a 100-foot blue. When did the latter titans emerge?" (Image: NOAA) 
How Women Mentors Make a Difference in Engineering
"In a year-long study—one of the strongest yet to look at the value of mentorship—Dasgupta showed that female engineering undergraduates who are paired with a female mentor felt more motivated, more self-assured, and less anxious than those who had either no mentor or a male one. They were less likely to drop out of their courses, and keener to look for engineering jobs after they graduated. “Often, science is messy and things don’t turn out neatly,” Dasgupta says. But in this study, “it was very gratifying how clean the results were.”" (Image: Jose Manuel Ribeiro) 
How Zika Conquered the Americas
"As viruses spread, they accumulate changes in their genomes. By collecting viruses from different places and comparing their genomes, scientists can work backward to estimate when and where an outbreak would have actually begun. A huge international team of scientists has now done just that for Zika. Sequencing hundreds of viral genomes, they reconstructed the virus’s voyage into and around the Americas. They’ve shown how often it entered the U.S. and why Miami was a perfect and singular gateway for it. And perhaps most importantly, they’ve confirmed what many had believed: In almost every affected country, Zika was already there for months—or even years—before the first cases were reported." (Image: Winfredo Lee)
A Manchester moment
More good reads: science and technology
- Julia Belluz on the Republican who’s stopping Trump from cutting science budgets
- How a usually harmless bacterium ended up killing 18 people in Wisconsin
- The story behind the robot who names paint colors.
- Scientists used mouse sperm kept in space to make healthy babies.
- Famed Columbia virus-hunter Ian Lipkin is being sued for sexual discrimination.
- Emily Graslie explains endangered species and why they matter, in the usual clear and delightful way.
- Here’s a much better explanation of that story I shared last week about the “flooding” problem at Svalbard’s seed bank.
More good reads: politics and society
- Incredible reporting from Vann Newkirk II on a decades-long lead-poisoning lawsuit in New Orleans, and how state apathy hurts black families
- "It’s embracing the brute reality of power-while obliterating one of its most important constraints." This is a vitally important Dara Lind piece on the distinction between rule of law, and law and order, and why Trump favors the latter.
- You’re not colour-blind or gender-blind, and pretending that you are is an obstacle to equality. Important, from Elizabeth Weingarten.
- The responses to My Family’s Slave—the Atlantic’s controversial piece on Eudocia Tomas Pulido—continue to pour in. Here are letters from survivors of slavery, a very smart Sarah Jeong piece on what the story says about the universality of women’s exploitation, and a reflection from one of our own writers on where TIzon failed.
- “They were the thread I could follow out of this maze of expectations, and also the walls of the maze.” This Jess Zimmerman piece on beauty, ugliness, and female archetypes is spectacular.
- Donald Trump’s base is shrinking, and local elections in safe Republican seats are way closer than expected.
- The document that made Comey announce the Clinton email investigation may have been a Russian fake.
- Trump released the full version of his FY18 budget—a plan that would slash science budgets, give the EPA its smallest budget in years, and severely reduce public health in the US. It also includes “the most egregious accounting error in a presidential budget in the nearly 40 years I have been tracking them,” according to one economist. Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office released their scores for the amended Obamacare repeal bill, which will deprive 23 million people of insurance.
- Here’s more on the Manchester bombing: a liveblog that’s being constantly updated with the latest news; a piece on the quietly defiant British response to terrorism; and one on how terrorists are learning.
- Congressional candidate—possibly Congressman by the time you read this—bodyslams a reporter who asks him about healthcare—and then tells a story that clearly contradicts the recording of what happened.
- A good post on that silly gender studies hoax that is being lauded and shared by the poorly named “skeptic” community.
- An eerie and strangely soothing gallery of places that have been abandoned by people.
- And finally… an ode to the word “bonkers”
And that's it. Thanks for reading.
- Ed