Links for Monday, April 13, 2015

Jeff Lichtman/Harvard University, CC BY-NC-ND, via theconversation.com

• "Back to the Sustainable Future: Visions of Sustainability in the History of Design explores the historical conditions for, and development of, sustainable design."
• Neat timeline of the history of vaccines from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
• A weird feud has erupted in the blogosphere between the "food babe" and the "science babe." What would Stephen Greenblatt say about this particular moment of modern self-fashioning, especially the use of femininity and sexuality to bolster authority and power?
• April's Scientific American features this infographic of bird evolution, which incorporates recent genetic analysis that has rearranged the avian tree. Falcons, for example, are more closely related to parrots than eagles!
• Architecture critic Rem Koolhaas weighs in on the implications of the spread of the "smart city."
• Meanwhile, America's first "passive buildings" or housing complexes with no active heating or cooling systems, are open for business in NYC.
• Since the early 1960s, biological workhorse GFP (also known as green fluorescent protein) has been making the laboratory a more colorful place.
• Last week ActiveHistory.ca ran a great series of posts about infectious disease, contagion, and the dilemma of the "anti-vaxxer." Check out the introduction by series editors Jim Clifford, Erikca Dyck, and Ian Mosby here. A favorite is this post by Joanna Dean on the use of animals, particularly cows, in the process of vaccine production.
• The postdoc system in the sciences, like the adjunct system in the humanities, is broken. (Unless you are a major research university, of course, in which case it works extremely well for you.)