One of Amos’ new efforts at DiscoverMagazine.com is a new “journalistic mashup” blog call 80beats, which reports on scientific topics of popular interest. Here’s a screen snip of the text from an entry about new solar panels that use internal reflection to collect sunlight:

As you can see, the body of the post is made up of quotes from other news sources, colored in blue. This is a format that I really like; mashed up news from many sources. Some blogs like this are even explicit about reporting on biases; the sources themselves are sometimes a part of the story.

What 80beats is doing well is to start developing a UI around the mashup text, allowing a very natural flow of the prose. Using blue text and the occasional editorial brackets means the reader can easily ignore the sources completely and read the post as an uninterrupted piece of content. The references are there, though, for anyone who desires more context.

Some more notes:

Sarah Deborah Scranton: Scenes from “The War Tapes”

Filmer of the war tapes, a personal look into the lives of soldiers in Iraq. The presentation achieves this intimacy not only through clips of the documentary, but also through the personal stories of Scranton herself. Wouldn’t it be cool if every polarized political debate be given this context, first?

Robert Wright: How cooperation (eventually) trumps conflict

Moral development, History has a direction. “Non-zero-sum-ness” as the driver for these trends, but also as the thing that links us in negative outcomes as well.

Deborah Gordon: How do ants know what to do?

Contrary to popular belief, ant colonies don’t have any central intelligence. The queen doesn’t control the behavior of the colony through chemical signals. In a series of experiments over the last 20 years, Gordon has demonstrated that colony behavior is fully emergent. Each ant, operating on a small set of rules (e.g. rate of contact with other ants), contributes a tiny part to colony-wide phenomena that ensure the survival of the whole. The experiments she describes are very cool, as are her descriptions of colony life. Ants seem to blur the line around what we designate an individual organism of a species.

Ben Dunlap: The story of a passionate life

In a talk that is more stage performance than lecture, Dunlap weaves a tightly knit story of his mentors. The experiences of all these men (coincidentally, all Hungarian) draw a picture of life well lived, an emergence from suffering with an unshakeable faith in people and a insatiable desire to learn and create.