Annalee Newitz

The retro-psychedelic adventures of Alice

Artist and book cover illustrator Jonathan Coulthart, whose curlicues and Victorian textures are always pleasing, has released a 2011 calendar. It’s a gorgeous, weird look at Alice in Wonderland that combines imagery of the 1960s with the 1860s. See all twelve months, and order your own calendar, via Coulthart’s blog Feuilleton.

New study shows American and Indian scientists are the most fraudulent

A new study shows which nations in the world have the highest rate of retracting scientific papers due to fraud. Which country has the dirtiest scientists? A statistician analyzes the numbers for you. Over at Nature blogs, biologist and statistician Bob O’Hara looked at the numbers from the study, which looked at numbers of papers…

The gorgeous molecular biology movie that’s taken the world by storm

Mitochondria are your body’s power plants – inside each of your cells, they convert sugars into energy. Last month, Harvard released this breathtaking 3D animation that shows a mitochondrion at work. Some call it the greatest science video ever made. Creators of the video explain: The animation highlights the production of Adenosine Triphosphate (ATP) –…

Book club reminder: Read “How To Live Safely In A Science Fiction Universe” for 12/7

This month, the io9 book club is reading How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, by Charles Yu. What’s this io9 book club, you ask? For those unfamiliar with the io9 book club, here’s how it works: You read the book. We create a special book club post on io9 when the meeting…

Read the winning entries in MCM’s book contest: Describe a news event in 2038

Last week, scifi creator and livewriting maniac MCM asked io9 readers to come up with a few plot points for his new novel, by giving him news stories from September 2038. Here are the winning entries! Winners will get a free copy of Typhoon, and their ideas will be incorporated into the sequel, Polarity, which…

An extremely unexpected (and possibly unwelcome) waterfall

Artist Jon Klassen creates friendly but dark drawings and stories about imperiled ships, interesting animals, and castles. He was a concept designer for the movie Coraline, too. See more of his diverting work on his website.

On The Event, everything is Joe Biden’s fault

I know you’ll be shocked to hear that on last night’s The Event, there were more inexplicable developments related to conspiracies and possibly-aliens-possibly-time-travelers. Plus, the president himself conducted interrogations! But the best part was Joe Biden. OK, so it’s not really Joe Biden. The vice president in this show is some weird blend of Joe…

How do you really know what time it is?

Why can’t you tell when an hour has passed without looking at a watch? Why are you able to do three things at once? Does coffee make time go faster? Neuroscientsts explain how our brains tell time – or don’t. It was a familiar feeling of surprise and dismay. Looking at the clock on my…

How to identify humans by guts alone

Though you’re born with an entirely sterile digestive tract, your guts fill with microbes as you grow up. In fact, these gut bugs outnumber your cells 10 to 1. And every species grows its own unique group of microbes. In fact, a study published today in PLoS Biology shows that our gut fauna are so…

The bacteria that could make you grow concrete in your mouth

A group of UK students have engineered a new bacteria they call BacillaFilla. It swarms into concrete cracks, then secretes a gluey mixture that hardens into concrete filler. But what if this bacteria escaped into the wild and started reproducing? Above, you can see three photos: On the far left is a concrete crack, and…

Moody, weird short film “Dirt Dauber” brings HP Lovecraft into the 21st century

We’ve been excited about HP Lovecraft-inspired Dirt Dauber since it started making the film festival circuit last year. Now it’s out on DVD. Here’s the synopsis: In this Lovecraftian fairy tale, a man who awakens naked and confused in the woods is helped by a strange local who speaks of curious mountain folklore, and a…

Three ultra-tiny, mysterious “lost frogs” discovered

With amphibians among the creatures hardest-hit by disease and extinction over the past several years, conservation groups are working to find and protect as many species as possible. Today Conservation International announced the discovery of three new ultratiny toads. According to Conservation International, the group which organized the search for lost frogs around the world,…

Science cheerleaders!

Just because you’re a science geek doesn’t mean you can’t also be a cheerleader. I love the bit at the end where they all chant, “We’re bustin’ . . . we’re bustin’ . . . we’re bustin’ down those stereotypes!” I expect this to be a subplot on Glee pretty much any old time. [via…

Will your next job interview involve a brain scan?

A study in the UK aims to figure out what the brains of business leaders look like, at least inside an fMRI machine. The brain images could be used in future as models for “ideal brains” in a business setting. via BBC

Primates have a hidden ability to repair their own damaged spines

For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that primates, including humans, have an innate ability to repair some spinal damage, including recovering from paralysis. The next step is to enhance this ability, so that we can regrow injured spinal nerves. It’s been known for a long time that people with moderate injuries to the nerves…

Annalee Newitz Bio

Annalee Newitz is the founder and editor-in-chief of io9. She has been writing about science, the future, and popular culture for over a decade, and has published articles in Wired, Popular Science, New Scientist, The Washington Post, 2600, The Believer and New York Magazine. Formerly she was a contributing editor at Wired magazine, a policy…

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On Supernatural, some people are better as dogs

Last night’s Supernatural episode, “All Dogs Go To Heaven,” was a great example of how this season’s monsters are more sympathetic than they’ve been before. And it also had a peculiarly True Blood feel. Spoilers! Now that Crowley’s hold over the brothers is out in the open, we can have a Charlie’s Angels style opening…

Biology is about to get seriously weird, says Nobel Prize winner

Paul Nurse, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize for physiology, said in a speech recently that biology is about to go through a revolution similar to what physics experienced after the discovery of quantum mechanics. The Guardian has an interesting excerpt from Nurse’s speech earlier this year, where he asserted that everything we know about…

Skyline is the most pointless movie of the year

There’s a crowded field when it comes to pointlessness in movies, but alien invasion flick Skyline broke from the pack with its unfunny vacuity. Do not despair, though. It was just awful enough to have so-bad-it’s-good potential. Spoilers! Skyline was like a Syfy Original Movie, but with a kind of pernicious, humorless stupidity at its…