Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)
- Roman Fedorsov, a Russian fisherman who posts all the weirdest bycatch from deep-sea trawls to his twitter account.
Jetsam (what we’re enjoying from around the web)
- One of Biggest Icebergs Ever Recorded Expected to Break Off from Antarctica. This is fine. Everything is fine. Nothing the see here.
- Sarah Jeong is on an amazing Star Wars tear over at Motherboard, first taking on the terrible storage formats in a galaxy far far away, then asking the hard question: Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic?
- Back to Climate Change. It turns out that the “pause” that climate change deniers like to point to never really existed, and now multiple studies confirm that there is no pause. NOAA challenged the global warming ‘pause.’ Now new research says the agency was right.
- President Obama is on track to be the most influential Ocean President in the modern era (for the record, Millard Fillmore has the strongest claim to biggest impact on the ocean in US history, and now you’re googling Millard Fillmore to figure out what exactly he did. He really wanted bird poop, that’s what).
- Kim Martini is a national treasure: What did the Boyan Slat and the Ocean Cleanup do last summer?
- Fisheries observer Keith Davis vanished from a fishing boat, leaving unsettling questions about safety, enforcement, and oversight.
- Introducing Pride, the rainbow-colored lobster. Wow.
Lagan (what we’re reading from the peer-reviewed literature)
- Hillier and friends (2016) Narrative Style Influences Citation Frequency in Climate Change Science. PLoS ONE 11(12): e0167983. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0167983. Which, of course, inspired an entire post last week: When I talk about Climate Change, I don’t talk about science.
- Leeuw and friends (2013) In situ Measurements of Phytoplankton Fluorescence Using Low Cost Electronics. Sensors 2013, 13(6), 7872-7883; doi:10.3390/s130607872.
- Bronstein (2017) The American Naturalist Persists … and Evolves. The American Naturalist 189: vii-viii. doi: 10.1086/690004. The American Naturalist, the first and oldest biological science journal in the United States turns 150 this year. It’s hard now to imagine just how radical it was for an antibellum journal, founded by Civil War veterans, to the be the American scientific journal.
Driftwood (what we’re reading on dead trees)
- Lab Girl by Hope Jahren. I’m way late to this party, but Hope Jahren’s memoir about a life in science is equal parts insightful, hilarious, and powerful.
- Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo. This was the winning holiday gift for my nieces this year, a collection of 50 short stories featuring incredible women throughout history with original artwork to go with them. Team Ocean will recognize some familiar faces.
Derelicts (favorites from the deep archive)
- Climbing Mount Chernobyl may still be one of my all-time favorite articles.
Feel free to share your own Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Driftwood, and Derelicts in the comments below. And, of as always, if you enjoy Southern Fried Science, consider contributing to my Patreon campaign to help us keep the servers humming.