We at HV occasionally explore science reporting. A post on the new blog Wallet Mouth (on consumer tools– buycotts & boycotts) links to a study which contends walking has a heavier carbon footprint than driving: Amuse-bouche: walking the walk. It also links to the reasons this s’pose-they’re-serious study is pure nonsense. Both point out the ways partial presentations of facts n’ figs can mislead.

(Wallet Mouth is writ by the better half of the quiet american radio family.)

Talk about oldies radio, this signal left the station three billion years ago, and it’s just arriving: from SPACE.com “Astronomers Find Mysterious Radio Burst.” Tune in if you’re roadtripping thru the small Magellanic Cloud (a couple small galaxies, about 200K LY away, in orbit around our Milky Way Galaxy) — that’s the direction in the Southern sky the signal was detected.

More at National Radio Astronomy Observatory, “Powerful Radio Burst Indicates New Astronomical Phenomenon.” The burst lasted less than five milliseconds. Journalists say the scientists say, “it may signal a cosmic car crash of two neutron stars, the death throes of a black hole—or something else.” Aka, dunno what ’tis. Maybe they can use it to fill the “Enormous Hole in the Universe” astronomers also recently found (”nearly a billion light-years across, empty of both normal matter such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen ‘dark matter’”).

Digg turned this up today:

How Toons

a collection of science- and engineering-related web comics.

I’m a bit partial to the form, my long-standing affair probably started about the time I got my first Dr. Seuss book. This struck me as particularly infectious — possibly because I’ve been re-immersing myself lately: novelized pastiches such as geoffrey woods’ Leaper and Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible; Moore and Gibson’s The Watchmen, Alex Ross and Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come, Frank Miller’s irrepressible Dark Knight and nearly everything Brian Woods has done; films such as Unbreakable, Sin City, Superman Returns, Batman Begins, and, of course Heroes.

What impresses me most, I suppose, is the resilience and versatility — how and why comics have persisted…

Still catching up on the Radio Lab listening. From season two’s “Where Am I?“:

Pilots call it “G-LOC” (gravity-induced loss of consciousness, pronounced “G-lock” not “glok”). Turns out this kind of experience (call it what you want) occurs quite frequently among fighter pilots. Producers Ann Heppermann and Kara Oehler bring us the story. We’ll hear from pilots Tim Sestak, and Col. Dan Fulgham on what it’s like to lose yourself while flying a plane. And we’ll hear from Dr. James Whinnery, who simulates G-LOC by placing pilots in giant centrifuges. His research monitors their brain activity as they accelerate to speeds inducing this loss of consciousness.

Have been catching up on my Radio Labs. Love this short segment from this season’s “Sleep” show: “We get in bed with producer Hannah Palin, and her husband, and her baby Dominic, as they all try to go to sleep. An intimate portrait of the effects of sleep deprivation:”

If I ever hear someone say the trite expression, “Think outside the box” I immediately think: Only a person who can’t think outside the box in the first place would utter such a thing. But this now, kind reader, is something entirely different and even amusing so check out this page.

Maybe his science ain’t quite kosher, but you gotta admire the conviction of The Guy From Boston, “Global Warming”:

A story on last night’s NPR ATC, “Studying a Koala Mystery in Eastern Australia” was the first of a new series from Jim Metzner (Pulse of the Planet). The series Science Diaries puts recorders, and blogs, in the hands of scientists “to let these dedicated folks tell their own stories.”

For the next week the story is an NPR Story of the Day podcast, “I can see his bum…”: