Mixture's Best of 2021

All your favourite links from the past year

To celebrate the end of the year and to help you catch up, here’s a special issue with the Best of Mixture 2021.

All these links were among the top 2 or 3 most-clicked links in each issue of Mixture. It’s funny because these were not necessarily the links I thought would be the most popular, but it gives me a good sense of what you like! 

This is also probably the best issue of Mixture to send to your friends to let them know what it’s all about.

The links are sorted by theme, and I’ve indicated which ones link to my own articles. 

🎵 Music and science

• Retiring NIH Director Francis Collins singing and playing guitar

• Mozart doesn’t make you smarter (by me)

• The Scientific Reason Singers Have a Knack for Language

• Two talks from the VOICES conference: Effects of Musical Training on Mathematical Learning in Children and Explore the neuroscience behind music-based learning

🎨 Art and science

• Swansea University’s Research as Art competition, and a link to one of the winning images

• The art technique that changed medical and scientific illustration (by me)

• How the arts can help you to craft a successful research career

🔬 Science of the pandemic

• The history of the 1957 flu pandemic

• How to assess your risk after being vaccinated

• Inside the Botswana lab that discovered Omicron

🦠 Daily life in COVID times

• Lockdown was a challenge for recovering hikikomori 

• What will future archeologists find from the COVID era?

• How a gay community helped the CDC spot a COVID outbreak

🌱 Environment and nature

• City birds are singing more since the pandemic altered our lifestyles

• The end of waste as we know it? (by me)

• Simplifying complexity: the story of a sustainability changemaker (by me)

💡 Life hacks or something like it

• Your daily routine needs more “non-time”

• To be more tech savvy, borrow these strategies from the Amish

• Defeating writer's block in the face of deadlines (by me)

🐈 Cats

• Cats sit in optical illusions

• Getting a cat down from the ceiling

• Hypoallergenic cats

✨Weird and  wonderful 

• The Italian town that built its own sun

• Finding Satoshi - story of a solved puzzle mystery

• Trolls need kind words the most

💻 Social media zeitgeist

• File not found: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans

• Facebook’s aging user base

• The metaverse that was made years before Facebook, and why it didn’t work

🕹️ Fun/interactive

• This is a throwback and was obviously in January’s newsletter: The 2020 game. You can still play it and relive a year that was even weirder than this year!

• Virus snowflakes downloadable PDF craft sheet from the University of Glasgow Centre for Virus Research

• Perseverance Mars Rover sounds recorded on Mars

• Draw an iceberg and see how it floats

• An artwork for pollinators

🤝 Other creators 

These links to other newsletters and podcasts genuinely made it into the most-clicked links list, so they’re probably worth checking out!

• Sleep With Me podcast

• The Sample (get a sample of a different newsletter every day)

• 10+1 Things newsletter

Thanks for reading and see you in 2022!