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Mickey Mouse at the CERN
The most famous laboratory of the year is certanly the CERN thanks to the discovery of a new boson that it seems equal to the boson predicted by Peter Higgset al. CERN was established in 1952 and...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 7: Yearbook
With the year drawing to a close, Inkfish's class officers have chosen superlatives to bestow on the posts of 2012. Please note that a prom king and prom queen were not elected this year because...
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So long and thanks for all the Archaea
Can't do any better than this title stolen from a colleagues blog. For those of us who teach about big patterns in biological diversity, one of the giants, Carl Woese, has died. His research produced...
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Questionable for-profit cancer center profits from alternative therapies
It sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory: a secretive businessman founds a for-profit medical center to treat cancer. His hospitals offer conventional treatments but also sell highly questionable,...
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Rita Levi-Montalcini, artist of science
portrait by orticanoodles - source: deviantart | flickrRita Levi-Montalcini was born on the 22nd april 1909 at Turin, Italy. In 1938 she came in Belgium because of the italian racial laws. After the...
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Chemistry and Biology: Kuhnian or Galisonian?
Peter Galison who has emphasized the dominance of experimental techniques in engineering scientific revolutions (Image: BNL).First published on the Scientific American Blog Network.Freeman Dyson has a...
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New Year's Resolutions
An important part of making resolutions is that you don't make resolutions that you cannot possibly fulfill, resolving to do things that are nearly impossible for you, and you end up beating yourself...
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We want a theory
We want a theory. An uncommon want When every year and month sends forth a new one Till after cloying the gazettes with cant The age discovers it is not the true one.Hannes Alfven from On the Origin...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 8: Square Peg in a Round Universe
We can all agree there's too much round stuff in space, right? All those planets and stars and orbital paths and moon craters and disks of debris get old. The most variation you can usually hope for...
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New Year's Day odds and ends
While the calendar year length is tied to the Earth's orbit, this arbitrary end and beginning comes some 10 days after the solstice, a definable point in the orbit, so this has never had much meaning...
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Student Evaluations and Commercialization of Courses
There has been discussion at the University of Minnesota regarding the release of student course evaluation information to the student body. Last year I was sent an email asking if I would like to have...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 9: Airport Worms
While you were vacationing on New Year's Day, nearly two million worms were working hard at Charlotte Douglas International Airport. The airport installed them in the fall of 2012 as part of its new...
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Mistreating household appliances in the name of science
Setting up an experiment today using soil (remember the recent lesson?) and plant samples collected last fall. The plant samples are to provide a bit of chopped vegetation, litter, to the top of the...
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Best Professors List
Yesterday, I discussed a movement to make parts of the course evaluations done by students available to prospective students. Basically an in house RateMyProfessor-like service. During that discussion,...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 10: Acoustic Scavenger Hunt
On the beach of a tiny Scottish island, a person kicked and jumped through unusual "singing sands" that made a squeaky barking sound in response. More than 3,600 miles away, I was able to eavesdrop on...
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Cave-dwelling plants
Cave-dwelling plants? What are they, members of the Bataceae? OK, that's just a name joke. The family is real, an Australian endemic and halophyte, but they don't live in caves like bats. And there...
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The electric science of Captain Swing
posted by @ulaulaman about @warrenellis comics #electromagnetism #Faraday #diamagnetism Later that year [1830], there was a spate of riots by farm workers in the south of England who were reduced to...
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12 Days of Inkfish, Day 11: Purse Animals
Ordinarily, I would use "purse animal" to describe one of the low-weight-class dog breeds that city dwellers carry around in designer shoulder bags. In this case, though, the animals aren't inside...
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Titillating tidbits about cucurbits
Titillating tidbits indeed! To brighten your otherwise drab morning perhaps you will find this discussion of the origin of cucumbers and the resemblance of cucumbers and similar shaped cucurbits to...
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HIV finds a cellular door knob - the SIGLEC1 story
This provides some background/analysis of the upcoming #microtwjc week 18 paper on HIV/SIGLEC-1 interactions Viruses are classed as 'obligate intracellular parasites' and so they have to get inside a...
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