Recently, I came across an article about mortality and survival in Game of Thrones (GoT). The study is published in Injury Epidemiology, examining the survival of 330 main GoT characters, sociodemographic factors, time to death, and circumstances of death. They find that mortality risk is high and characters are more likely to die if they are male and lowborn. The article is a great read including humorous aspects. I started to search for other GoT research and found astonishingly many articles. And there is probably more!
The purpose of the study from Daniel and Westerman (2017) is to determine how people reacted to the end of a parasocial relationship per a character death, by analysing Twitter reactions after the death of fictional character Jon Snow from Game of Thrones. They found that we may respond to a television character’s death in some similar ways as a real person’s. Jules and Lippoff (2016) investigate the dermatological deaseas called Greyscale and compare it to the Hansen disease, or leprosy. And finally, Clapton and Shepherd (2017) show that cultural texts such as GoT can show us different ways of thinking about the world.
There must be more articles that in a serious (or not so much) way try to gain knowledge from a television serious or how we react or interact with/to it. I would love to study some ecological aspect of Game of Thrones. Maybe something about the dragons…
SoilTemp is a new project initiated by Jonas Lambrechts and collegues to create a global soil temperature database. The goal is to make soil temperature data available to scientist, increase and facilitate collaborations across projects and synthesise microclimate data on a global scale to answer key ecological questions.
SoilTemp has recently launched a webpage, where information regarding the data, project updates and future publications can be found. So far they have collected For 1867 temperature sensors from 11 countries, from sea level till 6194 meter above the ocean, and covering more than a decade. And the collection is ongoing.
SeedClim has already provided their long-term (10 years) of soil temperature data. TransPlant, our Chinese Collaborators will follow.
I just discoverd the coolest thing ever! PhyloPic, a database with reusable silhouette images of organisms. Each image is available under a Creative Commons license and can be reused (for non-commercial work), some need to be attributed.
