Rusten's Picks from among Ed Yong's Weekly Picks (8 Sep 2012)

Every week, science writer Ed Yong compiles his favorite stories, photos, and more "Missing Links" (often 100 links with Ed's comments). This week, Ed has a whole section of links on the recently release ENCODE project findings ... reactions to his own, now updated story (which I posted here) and much more. Explore those links if you haven't heard enough already.

Here are my favorites from this week's list:

 
Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science

Stories, Short and Long

Do birds hold “funerals”? A paper said so. The media said so. Barbara King explains.

Totally brilliant Alexis Madrigal story on how Google is building the world’s best maps with its Ground-Truth project

Meanwhile, Becca Rosen considers what it is about an elephant’s tusks that makes them so valuable?

Poignant: ‘A great silence is spreading over the natural world’

Fungi shoot salt into the air and make clouds over the Amazon. Which is awesome.

How to make an octopus – a wonderful tale of dissection and model-making.

Some photos (with and without text)

What an absolutely gorgeous photo of a giant Pacific octopus.

Really evocative. Composite photos merge scenes from 1906 San Francisco quake w/ present day.