Virtual museum tours and virtual lab courses

And more in Mixture's monthly picks for October 2020. The newsletter has a new look but still has the same science, art, music, and fun things as before.

If this newsletter looks different than the one’s you got before, it's because I've moved it from Mailchimp to Substack. You can read more about the changes here, if you’re curious, but the things you most need to know are:

• It's better than before, with the content you like closer to the start.

• If you were previously only getting the quarterly music/science emails, you will now get a few more (here’s why) and they will include other topics as well, but I'll try to make sure there's music/science content in each one.

With that out of the way, let's move on to the fun stuff.

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COVID-19 globe lino print by me. I don’t normally make my own sciart but I got lino supplies to play with and this is all I could think of.

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Interesting things

• Take a virtual tour of the National Museum of Natural History, or visit cities around the world without leaving your couch.

• Have a coffee while you still can, because coffee plants are in danger.

• An AI can predict music genre based on album covers.

• An interview with slime mold scientist Audrey Dussutour.

• “Sing for Science” is a new podcast where scientists and musicians discuss science and music.

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Book recommendation

I’m currently reading Rebel Cell by Kat Arney. It’s a book about the cell biology and evolution of cancer - so it’s more about DNA, less about pathology. If other cancer books are too clinical/historical or not scientific enough for you, you’ll probably like this one.

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What I’ve been up to

• I’m currently running a survey for people who were supposed to teach an undergraduate lab course (e.g. biology or chemistry ) during the pandemic, and had to rethink their teaching labs. This is for an article, and the survey is to help me figure out who to talk to. Please pass it on to people who might be interested. I’m collecting responses until November 17.

• The survey is funded by a journalism research grant from Falling Walls x Berlin Science Week, which I will be virtually attending next week. The meeting is free to attend with registration.

• I also recently won an ABSW award for last year’s Undark opinion piece about inquality in genetic medicine.

• Finally, I’ve spent the last eight months writing Narrative Tools for Researchers — the newest Nature Masterclasses course. The course will be available on the Masterclasses website from November 2nd. This was the main thing I’ve been doing these past months!

Sorry, this was a lot of personal news. I promise there’s less/nothing next month. It all just converged on October!

Things I wrote

• How we talk about AI affects who gets credited for AI art (Forbes.com)

• Math shows how the composition of landscape paintings changed over time (Forbes.com)

• Award-winning fish image shows a feature that may help Alzheimer’s research (Forbes.com)

• The Brave & the Innovative: Guardian of integrity Asta Soininen (Neste)