sciencepunk | February 3, 2009One of the guests on tonight's edition of the One Show, BBC1's highly enjoyable magazine programme, was Lord Winston, the famous fertility scientist and TV presenter. Discussing a segment entitled "Are we ashamed of God?", Lord Winston said that science was only one of multiple truths, or words to that effect. The programme goes out live so I won't be able to check until it's posted online. Yeah, I know if I had Sky+ or some fancy crap I could stop it, replay it, Photoshop goatse images all over the place, but I don't so bah humbug.
EDIT: The footage is now available here (from around 07:…
sciencepunk | February 3, 2009We all know that the way to a man's heart is through his stomach, but surgeons at John Hopkins University Medical School have demonstrated that the way to a woman's kidney may be through her vagina. The pioneering surgery, carried out on a 48 year-old woman for the purpose of organ donation, is much less painful and invasive than traditional surgery, and results in three tiny pea-sized scars rather than the normal six--inch scar. The team hopes it will encourage more women to donate a kidney stating: "An organ donor, in particular, is most deserving of a scar-free, minimally invasive and…
sciencepunk | February 1, 2009When I first stumbled across the page entitled "50 Reiki One-Liners" I thought it was going to be some kind of introspective quack humour. Silly me. No, this is the real deal:
On July 30, 2008 I started a new service in the microblogging world by sending out this one-liner about Reiki:
Reiki is living with wisdom & compassion.
Since then Reiki One-LinerSM has gone out to Plurk and Twitter everyday between Monday and Friday, with two breaks of a few days since its inception.
Now I know that Reiki - a 'therapy' that doesn't even require the practitioner to be in the same room as the…
sciencepunk | January 27, 2009Is it possible to pack a DVD with idiocy so dense that light bends around it? I don't know, but I found someone who gave it a damn good try. The Beautiful Truth is a 2008 documentary about Gerson Therapy, the supposed diet-based cure for cancer. It produced by earth NOW! a small indie label from the Cinema Libre Studio. There are numerous excerpts from the movie on YouTube, which give a fascinating insight into the nonsensical, incomprehensible world that the filmmakers live in.
(weirdly, YouTube links all of them to a video entitled 'How masturbation damages the body'. It's not clear why,…
sciencepunk | January 27, 2009Today my sweet new business cards arrived from Moo.com - a whole 6 days ahead of schedule!
I've been trying to get some made for a while, and Moo.com have a seductively simply online card creator, allowing you to upload pictures or import them from Flickr, Facebook, etc. You can even use several different images if you want. Then pick colours and card stock, add your text, and hey presto! your cards are on their way. You even receive a sweet little box, dividers, and a buzzword bingo card:
Perhaps you think this is the point where I give you some product code and receive a sneaky…
sciencepunk | January 27, 2009Publisher Penguin are marking the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species with this rather splendid edition boasting cover art painted by Damien Hirst.
Says Hirst of the project:
I was given a paperback copy of On the Origin of Species many years ago by a friend and I loved it, especially the contentious aspects of it. Being brought up a Catholic and questioning the nonsensical creation theory, it was exciting... I suppose the work, in a modest way, acknowledges Darwin's analytical mind and his courage to believe in those ideas that questioned the very fabric of existence…
sciencepunk | January 26, 2009Taking the art of small print to a whole new level, physicists at Stanford University have created the world's smallest lettering, just 1.5 nanometres tall:
Colin Barras reports in New Scientist:
The researchers wrote a computer program that works out how to arrange the carbon monoxide molecules such that they scatter electrons into waves of a particular shape. The software also demonstrated how varying the energy of the electrons could produce different shapes from the same pattern of molecules.
Full story
sciencepunk | January 24, 2009Student society BlueSci / Cambridge University Science Productions have invited me to give a talk next Tuesday Wednesday (28th). It'll be about making zines and blogging and making sweet websites and being a filthy Nathan Barley-esque media whore and the like. Audience participation encouraged. If you'd like to come along and chat, email enquiries@bluesci.org to book a place.
The following night I'll be in London for the launch of Standing Up For Science 2, a guide to tackling pseudoscience produced by the Voice of Young Science. I'm not sure if that one is open to the public but you…
sciencepunk | January 23, 2009Shares in Sony, Nintendo, and major games companies dropped sharply today after scientists linked playing video games with poor relationships with friends and family and increased drug use. Nintendo, long the face of family-friendly gaming, were said to be aghast and promised to immediately discontinue their wildly popular Wii system.
OK, so only one part of the above is true. A press release from Brigham Young University revealed that undergraduate Alex Jensen and his tutor had questioned 813 college students on their gaming habits and other behaviours, concluding that:
"As the amount of…
sciencepunk | January 16, 2009
As some sharp-eyed reader may have already spotted, the SciencePunk blog has relocated to the Seed Media Group's ScienceBlogs. Let's take a moment to absorb these new surroundings.
OK, done? Those of you who have already run back to check sciencepunk.com will find it too has changed substantially. Drama abounds!
From today, the whole SciencePunk caboodle is getting cranked up a notch. Wave goodbye to the version 5 we all knew and loved, and say hello to version 6. (Ah, you always wondered what that stray /v5 signified, didn't you? Why not check out v4? Web 1.0-tastic!) The site has…