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Weird words of science: prilled iodine
"Sample of iodine" by LHcheM. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia CommonsI was browsing the paper version C&E News on the train yesterday afternoon, and...
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Isaiah Berlin, science and the dangers of certainty
Isaiah Berlin (Image: hannaharendt.org)The essence of science is uncertainty. The scientific process gropes, not finds, its way to the truth. And yet there are those who have sought certainty and...
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Frankenstein and his monster in the age of Oprah and NIH funding
Frankenstein and his monster on Broadway(Image: dvdbeaver.com)The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Laughlin is one of those rare minds who combines a wide-ranging knowledge of many fields with a...
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Schrodinger and Hawking in the Starbucks line
This list of entries entitled 'literary Starbucks' speculates what different well-known writers and fictional characters would order based on their personalities if they were to suddenly turn...
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The 100 most highly cited papers of all time: Tools, not ideas
A rather obscure paper by biochemistOliver Lowry is the most highly citedscientific paper of all time(Image: beckerarchives)Nature has published a comprehensive list of the top 100 most highly cited...
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The rise of the male nerd and the decline of female computer scientists
From NPR comes a very interesting graph and hypothesis. The graph shows that the percentage of women who received degrees in computer science was actually rising until the 1980s and then started...
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How to medicate to have the memory of a 30 year old
TPP worries about having more senior moments, episodes of memory lapses. Of course the darned things, memories, continue to accumulate, so if some one says TPP has the memory of a 30-year-old that...
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22 health lessons from “Trust me, I’m a Doctor”
The BBC ran an excellent second series of three episodes of “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor”. You can dig into all their conclusions here. Here are the take away lessons from it: 1. Moderate amount of exercise...
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The Gordian Mouse
North American deer mouse from near Santa Fe, New Mexico, possibly Peromyscus sonoriensis. Copyright J. N. Stuart.The North American deer mouse Peromyscus maniculatus has been recognised as one of the...
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“Shocking Report” on flu vaccines is neither shocking nor correct
Flu season is coming, and once again it’s time to get your flu shot (or snort, if you prefer FluMist). It’s not perfect, but the vaccine is your best protection against the influenza virus.So I was...
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Is it ethical for candidates to lie to the electorate? Is it ethical to lie...
Hooweee! Does TPP ever feel popular! As the midterm elections approach and the campaign for governor of Lincolnland remains neck and neck, the telephone calls are unrelenting. You keep expecting one...
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Edward Teller plays Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata
Volatile neurons and detonators fire, tritium and moral ambiguities fuse, faith and plutonium implode, the hauntingly beautiful notes intertwine and signal a glorious armageddon.Source.
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Biologists, chemists, math and computing
Here are some words of wisdom from C. Titus Brown, a biology professor at Michigan State University, on the critical importance of quantitative math, stats and computing skills in biology. The larger...
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The simple physics behind a horrible tragedy: A tape measure with the energy...
From the NYT comes this really tragic story of a man who was killed when a tape measure from a construction site fell down 50 floors and struck him on the head. My deepest condolences to his family....
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Epiphenom is moving to Patheos!
I'm excited to say that, after many lovely years here at Field of Science, Epiphenom is moving to a new home at Patheos: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/epiphenom/Patheos is a major site with many...
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The gods themselves...
OK, so there are parallel universes which may influence our own universe, and yes, quantum effects can register a full 10 point Oh on the weird stuff-a-meter. This news was an instant reminder of Issac...
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Fabiola Gianotti, Director General at CERN
http://t.co/rYzcXWlvR0 about #FabiolaGianotti #CERN #ATLAS Fabiola Gianotti is an Italian particle physicist, a former spokesperson of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in...
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Nundasuchus songeaensis, a New Archosauriform from the Middle Triassic of...
Nesbitt, S. J., Sidor, C. A., Angielczyk, K. D., Smith, R. M. H., and L. A. Tsuji. 2014. A new archosaur from the Manda beds (Anisian, Middle Triassic) of southern Tanzania and its implications for...
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Horrible, terrible, no good, very bad changes - SCOTUS to blame
Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing is as discouraging, as disgusting, as bad as the roll back on voter rights sanctioned by SCOTUS. What the ever loving hell are these black-robed morons thinking?...
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Public domain book illustrations
Here's a huge HT to the Agricultural Biodiversity Blog for alerting us to the over 14 million images obtained by scanning books in the public domain, books on which the intellectual property rights...
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