sciencepunk | March 9, 2009
Fans of the traditional Japanese boxed lunch have welcomed news of a self-packing octopus. Staff at the New England Aquarium were able to encourage a 7-foot Giant Pacific Octopus to cram itself into a tiny 15" box. Aquarist Bill Murphy said:
I place one or two live crabs inside the box and the octopus has to learn how to open the box to get the food. I start the octopus off with the small box and once he has mastered the lock I switch to another box and once he has mastered each individual box I put a box inside a box to keep him active and challenged.
Full story here. Hat tip to Ed Yong…
sciencepunk | March 6, 2009
The BBC has a bit of a patchy track record when it comes to promoting pseudoscience. On the one hand, they've featured investigations into homeopaths and Brain Gym, on the other, various charlatans still manage to slip the editorial net and promote their particular flavour of quackery on air. This is one of the latter occasions.
Last Wednesday, life coach Janet Thompson managed to bag herself a good chunk of air time on the Chris Evans Drive Time show on BBC Radio 2 to promote herself and make bizarre false claims about how the human body works. You can listen to the show here, the…
sciencepunk | March 6, 2009
Thanks to BoingBoing for this great video of Mr George the SuperMagnetMan, vendor of all manner of high quality, super-powerful magnets. As he demonstrates in this video, these magnets aren't toys! Or rather they are toys, albeit ones powerful enough to crush your puny, fleshy fingers. The money shot is around the 3-minute mark...
So perhaps you've watched the lime getting pulverised into the beginnings of a good pie, and you're still not convinced these magnets are dangerous. Lucky then, that someone out there was unlucky so you don't have to be stupid. Here's the aftermath of Dirk's…
sciencepunk | March 5, 2009National Geographic has the scoop on this incredible fish that boasts a transparent, glass-like head. The two dots at the front of the fish are actually its smell organs, the eyes are under the green barrel-like structures, which can be tilted and pivoted to find food or detect predators. More pics and the full story here.
sciencepunk | March 1, 2009Last month, the UK Government came up with an ingenious new idea to stem the rising tide of obesity that is already spilling over low-slung jeans everywhere: eat less. Health Minister Alan Johnson met with a coalition of confectionery giants including Mars, Coca-Cola and Nestle, urging them to reduce the sizes of their delicious, calorie-laden snacks.
Shrinking portions is not a new idea. Last year, Food Standards Agency formed a panel to explore the role of food portion in our diets after announcing that reducing portions would be one of four key proposals for encouraging healthier…
sciencepunk | February 26, 2009
A mischievous octopus is being held responsible over the flooding of a Californian aquarium after sabotaging the filtration system. Employees at the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium arrived at work yesterday to find their offices soaked with hundreds of gallons of seawater. The source of the flood was traced to the aquarium's small two-spotted octopus. Staff member Brianne Emhiser stated in a press release:
"Our best guess is that the octopus, who is incredibly gregarious and curious, tugged on a valve in her tank last night causing a steady stream of water to overflow out of the tank."
The…
sciencepunk | February 26, 2009Today the Big Daddy of bad science journalism, Ben Goldacre, received the advance new-look copies of his fantastically brilliant book, Bad Science. He didn't take well to having his picture in it, either because he is so modest he gets flustered by these things, or because he is in reality several different people engaged in an elaborate ruse the meaning of which we cannot fathom.
Anyway, all his harping inspired me demonstrate just how bad the Bad Science cover redesign could have been. His publishers may, for example, have tried to boost female readership by breaking into the misery-lit…
sciencepunk | February 24, 2009
Today is Shrove Tuesday in the UK, relating to some archaic mumbo-jumbo religion nonsense about Jesus but generally celebrated as a good excuse to gorge oneself on pancakes. For some reason, newspapers like to ignore these religious overtones and focus on adding their own mumbo-jumbo science nonsense instead. Making and eating pancakes is one of life's simplest pleasures. Why is everyone trying trying to complicate things with god and science?
In 2002, the BBC reported on physics lecturer Dr Gary Tungate who had calculated the mathematics involved in flipping a pancake,
contributing this…
sciencepunk | February 22, 2009A: No.
Although many news outlets (including the BBC) are claiming that a billion people will tune in to the 81st Academy Awards, the figure turns out to have little grounding in reality. The billion-strong audience claim has been knocking around for a long time - Daniel Radosh recounts in an article for the New Yorker that the figure was first touted way back in 1985. Although no supporting evidence has ever been provided to verify the claim, Radosh makes the reasoned guess that someone must extrapolated the 43.5 million domestic audience (15% of the US population) to 15% of the global…
sciencepunk | February 20, 2009
The Space Game might not have the most inspired title, but beneath the nondescript exterior lies a jewel of a real-time strategy game with some interesting quasi-bioinformatics. Made by the Casual Collective for games portal Candystand, it runs in-browser and saves your progress as a cookie, and games last a nice 10-15 minutes - perfect for a short break.
The principle of the game is fairly straightforward - you control an asteroid mining company and your job is to extract as much mineral as you can whilst fighting off bands of space pirates. Enemies come in different flavours and you…
sciencepunk | February 19, 2009I came across this quote today - can you guess which group of pseudoscientists is being discussed?
These people use the "reverse scientific method"... they determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion.
No cheating with Google! Your suggestions below please.
sciencepunk | February 17, 2009
A letter appeared in yesterday's Guardian calling on Science Museums to cancel planned 'Israel Day of Science' events in London and Manchester. The letter carried 383 signatories including well-known figures such as Ian Gibson MP and Professor Jim Al-Khalili. Full details below the fold.
There's no doubting that Israel punches well above its weight when it comes to science and technology - website www.isracast.com regularly announces new advances such as impenetrable armour, missile interceptors, and unmanned aerial and ground drones. Each of these is undoubtedly a fantastic innovation…
sciencepunk | February 14, 2009Ever wondered what an iPod looks like through the eyes of a computed axial tomography scanner? Wonder no more! Radiologyart.com reveals what lies inside common household objects, from electronics to food to toys. They say:
Since the summer of 2007, the Radiology Art project has been underway. This is a project dedicated to the deeper visualization of various objects that hold unique cultural importance in modern society. So far, these objects have included toys, convenience-related foods, and personal electronics.
Here are some of the highlights:
A toy elephant containing a pull-string…
sciencepunk | February 14, 2009Last week the Guardian ran an amusing story of photo-fakery by enthusiastic Spanish tourism board employees:
Spain's Costa Brava uses Bahamas photograph in ad campaign
Tourist board denies being deceitful by using picture from tropical islands to advertise beaches in north-eastern Spain
It's only afterwards that things get weird...
Quite predictably, it turns out that sometimes the pictures in holiday adverts aren't actually representational of the destination. Who knew? The photo of an idyllic deserted beach used in a campaign for the Costa Brava was actually taken in the Bahamas. For…
sciencepunk | February 12, 2009
Yesterday the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) announced that after a careful review of the scientific evidence, ecstasy should be downgraded from Class A to Class B. The UK Government were quick to react by sticking their fingers in their ears and going 'LA LA LA'.
In a letter to the ACMD, Home Office Minister Alan Campbell said: "Ecstasy can and does kill unpredictably. The Government has a duty to protect the public and firmly believes that ecstasy should remain a Class A drug."
Sadly, this is the kind of reaction we have come to expect from the government when it comes to…
sciencepunk | February 10, 2009Currently doing the rounds on aggregator sites is this wonderful and bizarre marketing document supposedly produced by the Arnell Group during their recent redesign of the Pepsi brand. Check out the SCIENCE that's gone into this process:
Personally, I think it's probably a cheeky hoax at Pepsi's expense, but the best satire often becomes indistinguishable from the real thing.
sciencepunk | February 9, 2009Costas Efthimiou is a professor of physics at the University of Central Florida, who apparently spends his time debunking myths and legends. Judging from his website, he's also a fan of web aesthetics circa 1995. I'd post a screengrab, but it could never capture the untamed beauty of an animated "Under Construction" gif.
Anyway, Efthimiou has deduced the vampires are a mathematical impossibility with the following simple logic: if a vampire bit once a month, and all victims became vampires, the vampire population would increase exponentially until it wiped out the human population.…
sciencepunk | February 6, 2009Thanks to a sterling effort by a group of dedicated science bloggers and blog-readers, the whole Jeni Barnett MMR radio show has been transcribed for your reading pleasure.
Browse it, read it, blog it, be shocked, be amazed, tell your friends, etc etc.
OBVIOUS DISCLAIMER: This is a transcript pulled together by lots of people working late into the night. There will be mistakes, I'm sure, so use it as a tool to skim the show before listening to the bits that interest you. A recording of the show is available on Wikileaks, see here. You can also listen to each part via YouTube here.
The…
sciencepunk | February 5, 2009News just in: London's LBC 97.3 radio are using legal chill in an attempt to silence Dr Ben Goldacre's criticism of their scaremongering over the MMR vaccine.
Britain is currently in the midst of a measles epidemic due to a sharp drop in the takeup of MMR. Why? Because certain sections the media have been relentlessly fear-mongering over the supposed link between the jab and autism, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim. Even now, after most of the panic has subsided, some people insist on banging that hollow drum.
Kids are dying, and now those…
sciencepunk | February 4, 2009Let me tell you a story. It starts in the summer of 2007, when the living was easy, credit hadn't crunched, and I had a spare £1,000 in my bank account. I decided I needed a laptop as I was travelling down to London regularly to be an awesome science punk. I could have got some ugly-ass brick for £300, but I fell in love with the HP Pavilion TX1000.
See the screen swivels around, turning the computer into a tablet. Added to that, it's small, light, has a touchscreen (obviously), dual headphone jacks, two remote controls(?!), webcam, more USB connections than I could ever need, tv…