Mason Inman - science journalist

17 May 2007, for Inkling  

You're not a hopeless dieter, you're a precision evolutionary famine-surviving machine

In Mauritania, morbidly obese women are considered beautiful. To symbolize wealth in a country that suffers from severe food scarcity, girls are force-fed until they’re fat.

14 May 2007, for Nature Network Boston  

If you’ve ever wondered whether there’s life on other planets, Boston-area researchers can tell you how we could find out.

As shown by two papers from Nature last week, local astronomers and astrophysicists are leaders in discovering and studying exoplanets—planets outside our solar system.

11 May 2007, for Nature Network Boston

During the last ice age about 20,000 years ago, much of North America was buried under ice sheets as thick as three kilometers.

Harvard researchers have found that parts of Canada haven’t fully rebounded from the effects of bearing all that weight. 

3 May 2007, for New Scientist

Nano-scale platinum crystals that resemble tiny, precision-cut gems have been shown to be powerful catalysts for driving chemical reactions.

The unusual shape of the crystals makes the platinum atoms arrange themselves in an uneven way that enhances reactivity.

1 May 2007, for New Scientist

A pocket-sized device that runs on two AA batteries and copies DNA as accurately as expensive lab equipment has been developed by researchers in the US.

The device has no moving parts and costs just $10 to make. It runs polymerase chain reactions (PCRs), to generate billions of identical copies of a DNA strand, in as little as 20 minutes. This is much faster than the machines currently in use, which take several hours.

27 April 2007, for Nature Network Boston  

We are all part of networks of people and researchers are just beginning to understand how information spreads through these networks.

It has a lot to do with our acquaintances, according to a new study of cell-phone calls. The weaker ties we have with people turn out to be crucial for the rapid transmission of information.

April 2007, for National Geographic's environment website

Smog hanging over cities is the most familiar and obvious form of air pollution.

But there are different kinds of pollution—some visible, some invisible—that contribute to global warming. Generally any substance that people introduce into the atmosphere that has damaging effects on living things and the environment is considered air pollution.

April 2007, for National Geographic's environment website  

Biofuels have been around as long as cars have.

At the start of the 20th century, Henry Ford planned to fuel his Model Ts with ethanol, and early diesel engines were shown to run on peanut oil.

24 April 2007, for National Geographic News  

Locals call it the kha-nyou and enjoy it roasted on a skewer.

But when scientists spotted the squirrel-like rodent at a Laotian food market two years ago, they called it a species previously unknown to science.

20 April 2007, for Nature Network Boston  

How do we tell whether a surface is glossy or matte, wet or dry?

According to a paper published online in Nature this week, our brains likely use a simple rule, based on the balance of light and dark spots seen on the surface, to reliably detect differences in surface quality.