Science News for Writers

The Gangs of New York : An Informal History of the Underworld by Herbert Asbury Order new or used from Powell's Books I remember reading the 1927 book, Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury and thinking of how the circumstances of poverty and crowding led to so much of the development of gangs, starting with groups of immigrant thugs and bullies and ending up many years later with the Mafia and other "professional" crime groups. If you haven't read Asbury's book but have seen the movie, while a few of the historical characters (yes, Bill the Butcher was a real person) ended up in the Martin Scorsese movie, unlike the movie, the book is an "informal" history of people living in the Five Points slum of New York.   Jump forward to today and we still have far too many marginalized youth living in or near poverty who feel the gang life is their only way to achieve anything.  This doesn't excuse their acts, but it does explain how they get to where ...

www.framestore.com Ted Danson as Lemuel  Gulliver in the NBC production aired in April 1996.   Linguist explains secret language of Gulliver's Travels Research suggests Hebrew solution to 289-year-old puzzle A linguist from the University of Houston is proposing a solution to a centuries-old puzzle: What sparked the "nonsense" language in "Gulliver's Travels"? Irving N. Rothman, a professor of English literature and Jewish studies at UH, says the mystery words are, in fact, variations of Hebrew. His conclusions are published in the summer 2015 edition of Swift Studies, an annual review of scholarship on the work of novelist Jonathan Swift from the Ehrenpreis Center. In the article, "The 'Hnea Yahoo' of Gulliver's Travels and Jonathan Swift's Hebrew Neologisms," Rothman points out a number of clues he used to reach this conclusion. Swift, he notes, was an Anglican minister who studied Hebrew at Trinity College. ...

UPDATE: After posting this story earlier today, I received a message on Linkedin from Dave Page, an author in the UK that reads:   "Please bear in mind that Conan Doyle attended Forensic courses in Scotland. The Lecturer named Bell would use the techniques later accredited to Sherlock Holmes during his lectures, with Doyle in the audience.  "This is covered in a book by one of Scotland's leading Forensic Examiners.  "Unfortunately I have lost the book he wrote but he named the Lecturer and he also became an expert on poisoning in Egypt for the Colonial Service and also highlighted that a bullet in the brain need not kill immediately but allow the person to still walk depending upon where the bullet lodged. "Conan Doyle used Bell's techniques in his books for Sherlock Holmes." A quick search on Powell's Books reveals this: The Real Life Sherlock Holmes: A Biography of Joseph Bell - The True Inspiration of Sherlock Holmes and the Pioneer ...

Credit: © Jan Matoska / Fotolia People in creative professions are treated more often for mental illness than the general population, according to a large-scale Swedish study. Found this study from 2012 while researching a piece on creativity; it adds a twist to the old writer's joke, "Writer's block is when your voices stop talking to you." Not only does the study - of 12 million subjects - link people who write with schizophrenia, it notes that writers are almost twice as likely as the general population to commit suicide.   That is an alarming statistic, but for some reason I, at least, don't find it surprising based on my career experience as a writer.  Writing is results driven avocation, and it can be very frustrating dealing with creative directors, editors and producers who often aren't very clear on what they want but are so willing to tell you after the fact what they do want.  Combine that with the difficulty of selling unsolicite...

www.medicine.uiowa.edu   Stanley Perlman, MD, PhD, of the University of Iowa's Carver School of Medicine, Iowa City, Iowa. There's a story here, a story of scientific curiosity that could lead to a defense against an outbreak and epidemic that could sicken, cripple and even kill thousands if not millions worldwide.  Better still, it's a story of how science and scientists work. Any takers?  While this may never be a screenplay that sells (then again it might) it could well be the basis of a book about Doctor Perlman and others like him.   Here's the story with a link to the original essay in PLOS in the attribution line. *  *  *  *  * Scientific curiosity and preparedness for emerging pathogen outbreaks An essay published on July 14th in PLOS Pathogens' new "Research Matters" series reflects on a career path that started with the study of a somewhat obscure mouse virus mice and ended up at the front-line of the SARS and MER...