RECENT POSTS 
SUMMARY: This well-constructed and engaging "flap book" is interesting, accurate and highly interactive -- a wonderful introduction to space for young children. Do you like flaps in your books? Even though I am an adult, I really like books with flaps. So knowing that, it's almost a foregone conclusion that I'd really enjoy Rob Lloyd Jones's new children's book, Look inside space [Usborne Publishing, 2012; Amazon UK; Amazon US]. That this is a children's science book makes it even better.... Read more
20 May 2013 |
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The UCL CoMPLEX annual conference this year coincided with a new initiative, the 2013 id² conference, an inter-disciplinary inter-doctoral training centre conference. the conference brings together students, from doctoral training centres in the UK and abroad, with a shared interest in the application and development of tools from mathematics, physics, computer science and engineering to problems in biomedical science. This exciting initiative is the first of what is hoped will be an annual conference bringing together researchers from DTCs around the country.... Read more
20 May 2013 |
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Summary: Finally, what I know you've all been waiting for: the six shortlisted young people's science books have been selected and are now in the mail to hundreds of children across the UK who will select the winner of the 2013 Royal Society's Young People's Book Prize! The complete shortlist for the 2013 Royal Society's Young People's Science Book Award. Image courtesy of the Royal Society. Are you a scientist who was inspired to pursue your passion after reading a... Read more
20 May 2013 |
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One last time, before she sets out to test her new library preparation with real ancient material, Marie Gansauge discusses the procedure with Matthias Meyer. Instead of artificial, lab grown nucleotide sequences, she will be working now with extracts from bones and teeth, all very old, all unique in the world, all in very limited supply. Once used, there is no way to refill the stores. Wasting any is not an option. She’s used to that, of course. Ever since... Read more
19 May 2013 |
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Two stories of waiting. Does this ever happen to you? You read a story, and it just sticks with you. Over the past 2 weeks, I felt like I was repeatedly playing that Portlandian game “did you read…?” with the following: Story 1: ‘Babies-in-waiting’ First up is a brutally honest essay from the Wall Street Journal by a woman who flipped the script on societal / self-inflicted pressures to settle down and opted to cryopreserve her eggs in her late-30s.... Read more
19 May 2013 |
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I recently wrote an op-ed piece for the Guardian in which I suggested that there is too much of an emphasis on ‘infotainment’ in contemporary science journalism and there is too little critical science journalism. The response to the article was unexpectedly strong, provoking some hostile comments on Twitter, and some of the most angry comments seem to indicate a misunderstanding of the core message. One of the themes that emerged in response to the article was the Us-vs.-Them perception... Read more
19 May 2013 |
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Scientists in the US have developed a calculator from living cells, using old-fashioned analog programming. Their hope is that the technology could be used in the future to program cells to kill cancer. Researchers have previously built electronic circuits using living cells. They achieved this by forcing living cells to behave in binary (digital) systems. But this is not energy efficient. And many cells are required to implement simple functions that transistors, the basic units of electronic circuits which are... Read more
19 May 2013 |
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Six years ago, to mark the then tenth anniversary of the announcement of the birth of the folkloric Dolly the sheep, and in the still reverberating wake of the South Korean cloning scandal, I practiced my fledgling/intermittent/debatable/wanton science communication skills with the penning of an article on the issue of ‘cloning.’ It being an anniversary with a ’0′ on the end, combined with topical relevance, suggested I might be lucky enough to get it published. And I was thus very... Read more
18 May 2013 |
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Every weekend, I publish a roundup of the week’s SciLogs.com blog posts along with some reactions from the comment feeds and social media. Big news this week is that SciLogs.com bloggers won two of the eleven Science Seeker Awards with an additional two of our bloggers nominated as finalists. The winners are Nathalia Holt and Pete Etchells; Nsikan Apkan and Jalees Rehman (highlighted by BoingBoing’s science editor) were finalists. Needless to say, we’re all very excited! To keep in touch... Read more
18 May 2013 |
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I am tickled pink. I wrote something for a magazine, an informational piece on the Cryptococcus gattii outbreak currently ongoing in the US (on which I expanded in my last blog post). My essay was published yesterday, on May 16, with the launch of the UK edition of the online news magazine, The Conversation. One of the editors for The Conversation is none other than the Scilogs community's very own, Dr. Akshat Rathi (he of the Allotrope fame; read his... Read more
17 May 2013 |
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Every day we provide you with #SixIncredibleThingsBeforeBreakfast to nibble away at. Here you can fill your brain with the most intellectually stimulating “amuse bouches” from the past week – a veritable smorgasbord for the cranium. They’re all here for you to load up your plate – this week’s “Morsels for the mind”. Enjoy! **** Feather, fur & fin – birds, beasts, fishes, and the things they do Best friends forever. Genome sequences suggest that dogs diverged from wolves 32K years... Read more
17 May 2013 |
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“Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy." Ishirō Honda (1911-1993) Sometimes monstrous things lurk at our feet. As proof positive, while I was gazing down the other day, I spotted a monstrously large dandelion flower right where I stood. Now, dandelions are quite commonplace at this time of the year. Mild temperatures and moist soil have promoted an explosion of blooms. Parklands and lawns... Read more
17 May 2013 |
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What can the members of multiple animal species (cat, dog, bird, ferret, llama, alpaca, elk, goat, sheep, horse, porpoise) have in common with humans? Deeper philosophical questions aside, all of them have fallen prey to a deadly fungus spreading gradually, but steadily, in western North America (southwest Canada; US states of the Pacific Northwest, PNW) for over a decade.1 Well, what-ho, what-ho Cryptococcus gattii (CG), I believe we have been introduced. The disease, cryptococcosis, generally, affects the lungs first, later... Read more
16 May 2013 |
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Despite the repeated claims that journalism is dying, we’re seeing a lot of news outlets spring into being. One of those new outlets, The Conversation, is taking a fairly interesting approach – marrying academia and journalism under one banner. The Conversation, which is based in the U.K., launched May 16. It is a free news site that (according to a teaser it posted online) is “produced by academics and journalists” and aims to “source news, commentary and the latest research... Read more
16 May 2013 |
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I came across an interesting study about the consensus in the scientific community on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), i.e. the idea that human activity is very likely causing most of global warming. What makes this study so interesting is the fact that it involved a “citizen science” approach. Volunteers who contributed to the Skeptical Science website were asked to grade the abstracts of 11,944 scientific papers on global climate change that were published in the years 1991-2011. These volunteers assessed... Read more
16 May 2013 |
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