Monday Science Links

Here's a week of sciency yumminess:

• Mark Liberman at Language Log looks at the assertion that Hillary didn't mean it, based her lack of hand gestures. He (gasp) actually counts them: In fact, Navarro's most recent book says (p. 226) that " lack of arm movement and lack of emphasis are suggestive of deception." But neither Navarro nor CBS give us any numbers, And I happen to have a free half hour, so even though it's the middle of the afternoon, let's do a little Breakfast Experiment™.


• Phil at Bad Astronomy writes a sequel about green things in space: A while back, I wrote about why there are no green stars in the sky (you should read that post first; some of the concepts below are explained there). But that’s not to say there are no green objects in space. There are!
  


• Candidate Barack Obama answers science questions from Science Debate 2008: Beginning with these 3,400 questions, Science Debate 2008 worked with the leading organizations listed to craft the top 14 questions the candidates should answer. These questions are broad enough to allow for wide variations in response, but they are specific enough to help guide the discussion toward many of the largest and most important unresolved challenges currently facing the United States. Barack Obama's answers appear below. John McCain has said he will also answer the questions.
  


• Judith at Zenobia: Empress of the East, as she so often does, blends art and history: British readers of this blog may well have already heard the news but, for those located elsewhere, the casualties in the Royal Academy of Art might come as a shock. Last month, a ceramic sculpture -- one of five by Costa Rican artist Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez on display at the “Summer Exhibition 2008″ (left) -- collided with an unsteady visitor. The 9-foot/3 m.-tall piece named Christina toppled over and smashed into hundreds of pieces. Before the fall, there were five little Frauleins Christina, Panthea, Zenobia, Semiramis and Guinevere. We'll come back to these names in a moment, but first an eye-witness report...


• Carl Zimmer at The Loom writes about a bird with a funny name and bad parenting habits: The Penduline Tit is not a body part but an ordinary-looking bird. Penduline refers to the pendulous nest that the birds build for their eggs. What makes the bird interesting to me is not its Beavis-and-Butthead caliber name, but how it raises its young. If you think that nature is never destructive, or that natural selection automatically finds beautiful solutions to life’s problems, this bird has a lesson for you.

Dig in!