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Recording science
Bruce Gibb mused in a Thesis column in Nature Chemistry a few months back about taking small chunks of time to tune up your research apparatus. I'm on sabbatical leave this semester, and in addition to...
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About.com Atheism/Agnosticism Awards
Over at About.com, Austin is running the 2012 Readers Choice Awards. Like last year, there are a number of categories, so head on over and nominate your favourite (you have until Feb 15, with voting...
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When We Talk about Snow
"Excuse me," the man next to me on the train said mildly, turning in his seat. "Do you remember what you did in the snow?" "Sorry?" "They say it was exactly this day last year that we had all that...
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Elemental tales: Strong waters
I ran across a reference to aqua fortis in one of the commentaries in Chemical News (1891). The conversation is about a suit in court where a chemist was injured when an inappropriately packaged bottle...
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Drat! Uncooperative plants & labs.
If there's one thing you can count on, the more a plant is needed for a laboratory class, the less likely it will be available. Generally, the weedier a plant, the more you can count on it, so when...
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Video abstract: Diffusion in curved spacetimes
In the following video, that I uploaded on youtube, Matteo Smerlak speaks about his recently published paper, Diffusion in curved spacetimes (arXiv):
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Will having a child ruin your career? Fate won't tell you
Elizabeth I was a career woman before anyone knew what that was. She opted to expressher urges to shape, rear, mentor, support, and create through her work as a monarch.Image via WikiMedia Commons,...
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Longevity & Booze
Good news, everyone! Every now and again a scientific study reports something that really cheers the Phactor up, and a 20 year study of longevity and drinking habits found that moderate drinkers had a...
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Student-powered field-trip van
Screw electric! This is so awesome! Yes, a student-powered field trip van! Where does the Phactor get one? The Netherlands! Do they come in other colors? And what about a rain canopy? Yes, they...
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Writing about disability: No science, no disabled point of view? No good
Image via WikiMedia Commons. Originally posted to Flickr.A flurry of articles has emerged in the last few weeks in which mental health professionasl voice opinions about developmental disorders without...
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Conference Cycle
Got a quicker response from our campus transportation chief than expected RE the student powered van. He also suggested that maybe the campus was ready for the Conference Bike; have a meeting and get...
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Science, funding, impact - some more questions
To allow the scientists to do good science, governments and the industry need to fund it. Not long ago I pondered why all the governments of big nations spend less than 1% of their GDP on science to...
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How the 2004 Tsunami affected the religious beliefs of Norwegian tourists
Does a traumatic experience encourage people towards religion, or does it have the opposite effect? In a previous post, I ran through the evidence that Americans who had lost a relative in the 9-11...
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Roald Hoffmann on the futility of classifying chemists
Roald Hoffmann has an editorial (open access!) in Angewandte Chemie in which he (mostly) gently scolds those who have criticized many of the last decade's Nobel Prizes as being "insufficiently...
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Dogs Understand Us Better than Our Closest Relatives
Does your dog understand you when you point at something? If so, this may be one of the few pop intelligence quizzes on which it can outscore a chimpanzee. Previous studies had shown that dogs can...
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An Alzheimer's disease breakthrough?
We all hope to get old one day. But if we do, our chances of getting Alzheimer's disease increase dramatically as we move into our 80s. As many as 50% of people over age 85 may be affected. Much...
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Friday Fabulous Flower - A Passion
It's snowing, not unusual in February, except for this year when there's been not very much snow. This definitely puts spring on hold for another 2-3 weeks. Darned woodchuck! So back to the...
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Back to the CIHR grant proposal
We've submitted four (!) papers in the past two weeks: the arseniclife paper, now under review at Science; the RA's E. coli competence paper, submitted to PLoS One after being bounced back to us by...
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First Evidence of Late Triassic Dicynodonts from Germany
Schoch, R. R. 2012. A dicynodont mandible from the Triassic of Germany forms the first evidence of large herbivores in the Central European Carnian. Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie,...
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The ethics of vaccination
Vaccines are distributed across the world and we desperately need them if we are to successfully control some our most deadly infectious diseases. But they also require vast sums of money and...
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