Blog Profile / Sciencebase
| URL : | http://www.sciencebase.com | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Academics / General Science | |
| Posts on Regator: | 1099 | |
| Posts / Week: | 4 | |
| Archived Since: | February 24, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Translating teenage grunts
Linguistics of adolescent phonetics If you don’t get it, then I just have one thing to say and it’s: “A voiced alveolar stop and breathy-voiced low-back unrounded vowel, with advanced tongue root” – duuuuh… (That latter words is described by James Harbeck in his accompanying article as aiming to sound as stupid as possible. Of [...]Show More Summary
Deceived wisdom about pruney fingers
I discuss the myths about why our fingers go “pruney” in the bath or swimming pool in my book Deceived Wisdom, the truth seems to lie in the work of Mark Changizi. In this cartoon, we see the explanation and get to hear his theory in his own words. Deceived wisdom about pruney fingers is [...]Show More Summary
SIDS, cot death absolute risks
The tabloids were screaming at new parents this week desperately yelling at them not to share a bed with their newborn because it could be lethal, causing sudden infant death syndrome, or cot death. The research said so. SIDS is tragic, of course, but a little composure, please. As NHS Choices explains: “The researchers estimate [...]Show More Summary
A design for life
As the average age of the population goes up with people surviving many years more than their allegorical three score years and ten, the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of senile dementia will rise too. Many people can suffer symptoms for many years and yet live independent lives or at least with minimal [...]Show More Summary
How did feathers evolve?
Carl Zimmer offered some insights at TED-Ed into how dinosaurs got their plumage and evolved into the flying birds, excellent birds, we see today. This is witty animation plucks up the courage to fill in the gaps. On an entirely unrelated note, I wrote a song about flight, which you can hear on my SoundCloud [...]Show More Summary
Win #DeceivedWisdom in our 10k competition
My publisher just added up all the sales of my book Deceived Wisdom including hardback sales since November, Kindle and ePub downloads and the Audible editions. The grand total so far…drum roll please…is 10,000 copies, which ain’t bad for a popular science book (although it was #1 on amazon for a while ahead of Sir [...]Show More Summary
We’ve got a lot of grounds to cover
Next time you’re sipping on your skinny, frothy mochachocafrappalatteccino with maple syrup and cinnamon at the local Costabucksorthree coffee shop and surfing on their EasyHack(TM) wireless internet spare a thought for the grounds. The burnt out and scalded fragments of beans gone by that in this household are recycled via the compost bins but on [...]Show More Summary
Pale Blue Dot
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft (launched 1977) when it reached 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from Earth in 1990. In the photograph, Earth is shown as a tiny dot (0.12 pixel in size) against the vastness of space. The Voyager 1 [...]Show More Summary
Getting the garlic blues
Pickler Andrew Dalby responded to one of my recent tweets about not cooking asparagus in lemon juice because it discolours it. He had found that his garlic cloves turned blue when he pickled them in spiced malt vinegar. The discolouration doesn’t mean that the pickles are inedible. Now plant material turning blue in acid (vinegar [...]Show More Summary
What if Greg House MD were on twitter?
What if Dr Gregory House were on twitter? Hungardian doctor Berci Meskó MD PhD ?knows his medical communities and uses the internet like a pro in his practice: “We must include digital literacy in the medical curriculum,” he tells TEDxNijmegen ;-) What if Greg House MD were on twitter? is a post from the science [...]Show More Summary
Get Deceived Wisdom audio book free
You can grab a copy of my book Deceived Wisdom, as narrated by actor Kris Dyer (Radio 2, Nice Mum, Edinburgh Fringe etc), for free with the Audible introductory offer. Sign up for a free trial here, download my book and listen on your iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone or any of more than 500 [...]Show More Summary
Science mob to attack austerity
Austerity measures – cutbacks in other words – are taking their toll on science. A special issue of The Euroscientist brings together an analysis of the impact of austerity on scientists and their research and the growing brain drain. The magazine is also encouraging other scientists, including those based beyond Southern Europe, to share their [...]Show More Summary
The Daily Fail
Periodically I receive links to stories in the British “tabloid” newspaper, The Daily Mail, from Sciencebase readers. I am yet to see anything in that paper that is worth the ink or electrons. Moreover, I wouldn’t even deem it fit to be torn up into squares and hung from a string in the lavatory for [...]Show More Summary
Let me introduce Professor Risk and Professor Risk
I met David Spiegelhalter at a conference a while back, a very engaging and charismatic chap with the real stats and the data to tell you all about true risk. His proper title is Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge. He is in two minds literally about playing it [...]Show More Summary
H7N9 bird flu
Is another bird flu on the rise? Report from Nature on H7N9 type A influenza virus and reported outbreak in China. Scientists and public health officials worldwide are on alert after China announced on 31 March that two people had died and a third had been seriously sickened from infections with a new avian flu [...]Show More Summary
Does eating fish really extend your life?
NHS Choices critiques tabloid claims for recent research on fishy life extension. “…study has found that higher levels of omega-3 in blood at the start of the study were associated with a 27% reduction in risk of death from any cause, and a 35% reduction in risk of death from heart disease in healthy older [...]Show More Summary
Buckyball discovery
Science is often portrayed as a fixed set of rules, impersonal, and devoid of emotions. It is not, as can be seen from the discovery of fullerenes, or more specifically buckminsterfullerene, the molecule that became known as the buckyball and on which I must have written a hundred articles over the years. I was working [...]Show More Summary
Whose line is it, anyway?
Nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli supposedly remarked that there are “lies, damned lies and statistics” but although the phrase was repeated often, it is more likely that it was coined by American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Regardless of its heritage, the phrase implies that the manipulation of statistics [...]Show More Summary
Greening end of life gadgets
Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) is a growing problem, there are mountains of obsolete computers, mobile phones, refrigerators, televisions etc piling up on dumps around the world. Regulations implemented at the National and European levels seek to force those disposing of WEEE to recycle and reclaim the countless, often toxic, materials present in wiring, [...]Show More Summary
38 things you might not know about the Moon
#18 It may seem obvious, but art does not always capture the true appearance of the Moon: where it is in the sky always tells you where the Sun is. You will never see a crescent Moon looking like an open parachute: if the crescent is on its side, the "horns" will point upwards, indicating [...]Show More Summary