It's a bird! No, it's a plane! No, IT'S... LEAPROACH
The twelfth episode of Consilience is out! You can download the mp3 here (27.6mb) and the file’s page on Archive.org is here.
Teaching Angela to Appreciate History
On June 1st 1974, Henry Heimlich published “Pop goes the Cafe Coronary” in the journal Emergency Medicine, in which he first described his eponymous maneuver. (The hind-lick jokes, by the way, were shamelessly stolen from the great Eddie Izzard).
Feedback and Follow ups
Apparently, the Rapture did in fact happen, it was just… invisible. (Read about the South African Camping followers and their hotel bill here). The world now really ends on October 21st. We, for three, are awaiting the explanations on October 22nd with some anticipation.
More on bees, colony collapse disorder and cellphones.
The UN decides… not to make a decision, so Smallpox can live on (in two labs, at least). The final decision is postponed until 2014.
Psychology Today apologizes for Kanazawa’s dumb (and racist) post. Also, that letter to American Psychologist by a bunch of evolutionary psychologists objecting to Kanazawa’s take on intelligence research is here.
News
South Africa’s minister of science and technology, Naledi Pandor, has re-prioritized the 2010-2011 science budget. Also: the African Innovation Outlook 2010.
New imaging techniques have found lost Egyptian pyramids. NASA have unveiled the “Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle” for manned “deep” space exploration.
Leaproach is a cockroach that seems to think it’s a grasshopper – the scientific paper describing it is here. Leaproach was named as one of the Top 10 New Species, a list compiled by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. We also discussed: Darwin’s Bark Spider, Walter’s Duiker and the Tyrant Leech King. Rest in Peace Spirit. (As usual, xkcd’s take is wonderful).
Listener Questions
We again tackle on of Paulo’s questions: “How do scientists prove the existence of dark matter if no one has ever touched it or seen it?”
Announcements
There will be a total Lunar eclipse visible from South Africa on June 15th. Go, check it out!
Skeptics in the Pub Joburg (Facebook / Plancast) is Wednesday June 1st at The Keg and Spitfire in Blackheath, starting at around 19:00.
http://www.archive.org/download/Episode12LostPyramidsLeaproachAndRipSpirit/Consilience12.mp3
Consilience: An African Science Podcast 
Your patience in answering Paulo’s question is admirable. I would have asked Paulo to google his questions. They’re not exactly obscurely difficult to find the answers. The analogy being teach them fishing rather than giving them fish.
Sure, except that he might Google a question and choose to read the misleading answers. I’d prefer to try and provide really good, scientifically accurate answers.
I searched that question in the show notes, me thinks if he chooses to ignore the first few pages of google nothing you say will convince him. But now I see that answering him was not a waste of time as your blog and this site appeared in the first page 🙂
FYI, the link to the Pandor budget story seems to be broken.
Thanks John. It looks like The Star stupidly re-direct their older article URLs to their main page. Will see whether I can find another version of the story.