sciencepunk | February 26, 2013During the First World War, an enterprising British field medic named Sgt James Shearer unveiled a machine that promised to revolutionise medicine. Shearer’s “Delineator” was a small wooden box that had an aperture at one end and a crank on the side. Clicking the shutter and winding the arm produced a small drawing of a human figure, punched with holes that diagnosed disease in any patient sat in front of it. The British Medical Journal hailed it as a life-saving device. These were the years immediately after Wilhelm Röntgen’s discovery of x rays, and the world was abuzz with the idea of…
sciencepunk | February 19, 2013Researchers at the Institute for Ophthalmic Research at the University of Tübingen have restored vision in blind patients using tiny retinal implants embedded in the eye.
Nine patients were chosen because they had all suffered hereditary diseases where the retina had degenerated to the point of blindness, but left the remainder of the visual pathway intact. Eight of the nine could still detect some light, although could not locate its source. One was completely blind. Each was implanted with a tiny 3x3mm film square containing 1,500 photodiodes which send out electrical signals when they…
sciencepunk | February 17, 2013Recently, I noticed something strange about the postage stamps on my mail. They have a glossy coat that can only be seen at certain angles. Written in this glossy ink are the words ROYAL MAIL over and over again, like a watermark. But there's something wrong. Can you spot it?
Look at the second line from the top - there seems to be a typo! On the left, it says M12L instead of MAIL. On the right, it says MTIL instead of MAIL. Here's the same image, in high contrast.
I hunted around for another second class stamp to see if the pattern repeated itself. Instead, I found this.
Although the…
sciencepunk | February 15, 2013Pretty wild news this morning - a meteor shower over the Central Russian cities of Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk has caused hundreds of injuries and damaged buildings. It is not connected with tonight's (very!) near-pass of asteroid 2012 DA14. Thanks to the prevalence of dashboard cams in Russia, there's some amazing footage already circulating.
The web's resident expert on all things heavenly, Phil Plait, has the details and analysis.
sciencepunk | February 12, 2013Following some conversations with fellow writers over the weekend, I've been thinking critically about writing - both my own and that of others. When I first started writing about science, it naturally stemmed from reading the work of very good science writers, and true to form my first steps were wholesale imitations of these people. Lately though, I find myself reading far more fiction authors, who tend to have a much richer style, elements of which I hope I can bring across in to non-fiction. There's a trend lately for narrative-led long form in the vein of breathless pop fiction novels,…
sciencepunk | February 11, 2013Witchcraft!
It reminds me of the "plasma polymer" coating developed some years ago by DSTL, Britain's defence research organisation. I wonder if the technologies are related?
sciencepunk | January 26, 2013"The problem with the London sci-comm crowd," a friend once smiled to me, "is that they can't invite their mates to the pub without giving it a title and calling it outreach". That jest has been on my mind lately, as many among us fret over the future of the UK's oldest science outreach organisation, the Royal Institution, after a botched attempt to modernise its stately London headquarters left those same hallowed grounds under threat of sale. Inevitably, these conversations have led people to question what it is the Royal Institution does, and whether this qualifies a proposed multi-million…
sciencepunk | January 12, 2013So, as I've said before, my mind is often occupied with how I might develop writing in new ways. For a while I've been working on an anti-blog that specifically contravenes all supposed user-interface rules (no comments, no archives, no title), which should hopefully launch soon. I've also started a new subject-specific blog that lives hidden within another website, one that isn't supposed to be for blogging. Sort of like an Easter egg. More about that soon too. Here's another idea that's been burning on my mind ever since I bought a Kindle.
E-readers are marvellous things, much more than…
sciencepunk | January 6, 2013Director Jilli Rose has made a short animated documentary about everyone's favourite back-from-the-dead, hiding-on-an-impenetrable-Pacific-island-fortress tree lobster.
Jilli says:
So many conservation stories are grim and worrying, it's easy to feel hopeless in the face of them. I want to drop a good story into the mix, to uplift and hopefully energise viewers, particularly kids, and to inspire them to care about the fate of creatures that may not be what they usually consider "cute" or "cuddly". Our film is heartwarming, funny, engaging, beautiful, lively, colourful and hopeful. Colour!…
sciencepunk | December 28, 2012It might seem odd that a book about vaginas inspired a different way to blog, but that's the honest truth.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how you might innovate when it comes to writing. It still irritates me that the overwhelming majority of the web is formatted in exactly the same way - rectangular containers interspersed by padded images. Consider how dull that is compared to the layout in any glossy magazine. Sure, I understand why the web sticks to that format, but it doesn't make it any less boring to use.
Anyway, back to innovation. One of the ideas that's been floating around…
sciencepunk | December 27, 2012 So you might have seen that Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced doctor who first linked the MMR vaccine to autism, has been given a "Golden Duck" award for "lifetime achievement in quackery". The tweet that accompanied it in my feed asked simply "what is the purpose of this award?", and I had to scratch my head too. Just what is the point? I don't really gel with the concept of the award itself, for a variety of reasons. Most obviously, it encapsulates the kind of negative behaviour within the skeptic movement that I've taken issue with in the past. It's far too easy for something like this…
sciencepunk | December 17, 2012I'm thrilled to be included amongst some sterling writers in the new issue of Arc magazine, Forever Alone Drone, discussing how urban exploration can act as a foil to the increasingly restrictive environment of cities. Public spaces are being sold off to private owners at an alarming rate, who can prohibit entirely legal behaviours and even exclude entire groups of people. In the future, simply getting from A to B might require a set of skills that currently only a few brave pioneers possess. Here's a short extract:
Elevators can be hijacked with triangular lift keys and sent to hidden floors…
sciencepunk | November 26, 2012I finally got around to playing the Walking Dead videogame this weekend, and I'm already hooked. "Video game" is a bit of a misnomer really, as it's more a piece of interactive fiction. You must guide your character, Lee Everett, through the dangers and dilemmas of a rapidly disintegrating society where the dead are returning to life. The decisions you make will have repercussions, both for your own character and the others you meet, and often you'll be forced to make choices that are not simple good versus bad, but bad versus bad. I've only played it for a couple of hours, and already my…
sciencepunk | November 21, 2012I quite like these spurious yet serious Haynes manuals!
From the press blurb:
British science writer and broadcaster Professor Chris Riley has written a book on the story of the Apollo Lunar Rover to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the vehicle’s final drive on the Moon, in December 1972.
Commissioned even before the first human beings had walked on the Moon, and intended to carry future explorers further and faster, through the mountainous lunar highlands, the ‘LRVs’, as they were called, symbolized NASA’s commitment to human space exploration, and a future of people living and working…
sciencepunk | November 12, 2012The science and technology blogs were alight with adulation last week with the news that with no assistance, illiterate Ethiopian children had learned to use and even "hack" computers given to them. Speaking at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative revealed an experiment in which Motorola Xoom tablets had been given to young children in two remote villages to see what they would do with them, and found that within months the children had learned to access a variety of pre-loaded material and even change the locked settings.
Like others…
sciencepunk | November 9, 2012
Dressed in a leather jacket and black roll neck, Daniel Libeskind holds an air of affability that complements his passionate and lucid discussion about the importance of architecture in healing and rebuilding communities. Born into a Jewish family in Poland, he experienced life under the totalitarian Soviets before emigrating to New York, a narrative that makes him ideally suited to be the man who produced new visions for Germany and Poland after the fall of the Berlin wall through to the Freedom Tower which rose from the shadows of the World Trade Centre in New York City. Speaking of the…
sciencepunk | November 9, 2012
From the moment he springs onto the stage, Tomás Saraceno's demeanour marks him out as an artist. Dressed in jeans and a hoodie, and wearing a scruffy beard, he stands in contrast to the parade of smartly-dressed academics that have so far made up the Falling Walls conference. Saraceno jokes that he has “about 400 slides” to get through in his 15 minute slot, yet it soon becomes clear that he really is going to try and get through them all.
Images whizz by as Saraceno hammers through his portfolio, and we’re flashed photos of abstract sculptures in metal, glass, plastic, some…
sciencepunk | November 9, 2012
Aaron Kaplan is rather in awe of being invited to the Falling Walls conference for what he calls his “hobby project”. But not all of us can boast a hobby that connects hundreds of thousands of people to the internet in a democratic, decentralised fashion. He is the founder of Funk Feuer, a peer-to-peer mesh that creates a cheap, robust, and distributed communications network.
Long before Senator Ted Stevens achieved meme fame with his description of the internet as a “series of tubes”, Bertolt Brecht opined that radio was used purely for distribution, and envisioned that if it could…
sciencepunk | November 9, 2012
Perhaps having anticipated some bleary eyes in the audience following last night’s reception cocktails, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian starts his Falling Walls lecture with a question: what day of the week are the most Google searches for “hangover”? The answer is, unsurprisingly, Sunday, a fact revealed by Google’s Trends platform, an open data project that allows anyone to delve into the wealth of knowledge in Google’s search records. Hangover follows a regular, predictable pattern according across the week, shown blue:
That red line? Those are Google searches for “vodka…
sciencepunk | November 1, 2012
Chinese Necklace by Inextremiss (Flickr)
From the Annals of the Weird, or more precisely Proceedings in Obstetrics and Gynecology, comes the story of a 21-year-old woman from rural India presenting a benign vulvar tumour resembling a "soft, pedunculated mass, with a wrinkled surface dangling from her left labia majus" about the size of a tennis ball. She had been abandoned by her husband, proving he was insecure about the fact his wife had bigger balls than him. Happily, after a visit to the doctors, the five year old growth was removed with "excellent cosmetic result", leading to smiles…