Monday Science Links

This week's science round up:

• Stefan at Backreaction tells us the Earth is smaller than assumed. No, really.


• A guest post by Lucia Pozzan and Susan Schweitzer at Language Log looks at usage of nearly/almost before and after negatives - opposites! Why?.


• Edmund Blair Bolles (I loved his book The Ice Finders, by the way) at Babel's Dawn examines the difference between human and ape pointing -part of a series on the origins of speech.
  


• Larry Moran at Sandwalk gives us a three part series on Fixing Carbon: the Rubisco Reaction, its Structure, and Building Rubisco. As he says, "Life as we know it is based on carbon." But how do we get it?


• Zenobia, Empressof the East, takes a look at the discovery of Hatshepsut's mummy and asks "why was she moved and why was her mummy misidentified? She also points us to other posts by other people asking other questions - and providing lots of info and pictures.

Dig in!