Photo of the Week: Australia, in what looks like watercolor, but is actually a satellite image from NASA. Photo by U.S. Geological Survey via Flickr Creative Commons.

I missed Friday last week. In fact, I think I may have missed last week entirely. I blinked and it was over. So this week’s web crawl, brought to you from not-so-sunny-but-super-warm Gainesville, Florida, where the annual Science Writers conference is taking place, covers October 25 and November 1.

Okay, actually, this one came out on October 9, but I discovered it later than that. Scientists are mapping how the brain responds to poetry and prose. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s quite similar to the way it responds to music.

On the 19th, The Economist had two articles about on the need for a reinvigoration of the all important process of verifying results in scientific research, a practice that is apparently less common than it once was and still should be, for various reason.

This Palestinian guy hacked into Facebook exec Mark Zuckerberg’s personal FB account to prove a point and is now using money from a crowd funding campaign to start a company that hacks for the greater good.

A 3D animation of what it would be like to fly over Mars? Yes please.