sciencepunk | September 14, 2010In September Wired UK published my feature on the health risks of nanotechnology. The article is now online.
Nanotechnology's commercial growth has been accompanied by fears that it could damage human health and the environment. This in turn is stoking pressure on government and regulators to limit -- even ban -- a technology whose promise includes cleaner fuels, improved water filtration, better medicines, faster electronics and healthier foods.
sciencepunk | September 11, 2010I recently picked up a copy of adventurer and anthropologist William Seabrook's 1929 book on Haitian Voodoo, The Magic Island. The book is out of print, so I thought it would be nice to share some of the wonderful spooky illustrations that accompany the text.
See the whole lot on Flickr
(My HP Photosmart C4180 scanner is a piece of crap, sorry, if there's enough interest I'll rescan these at higher quality.)
sciencepunk | September 2, 2010I have a love of innovative clocks and this is no exception.
The catena wall clock was designed by Andreas Dober for anthologie quartett. Yours for just $2,338.
sciencepunk | August 27, 2010I stumbled across this delightful psychoactive drug Venn diagram. Isn't it pretty?
[click to enlarge]
sciencepunk | August 16, 2010Thanks to Elliot Reuben who points out that when it comes to singing about science, us Brits aren't being left behind. Behold Amoeba to Zebra, the educational music entertainment brainchild of Leeds-based pop rockers Being 747.
They say:
"As a band, we all share a fascination with the wonders of the natural world and the evolutionary processes that have shaped the flora and fauna of our planet. We decided to use our combined creative talents to do something truly worthwhile - to tell an incredible story that will stimulate the imagination of young people and leave a lasting impression"…
sciencepunk | August 15, 2010Michael Hearst of One Ring Zero writes:
I just did a Google search for "science blogs," and landed on your site. And the first thing I see is a picture of The Magnetic Fields, who are good friends of mine, and who I've toured with. Very strange. The reason I was searching for science blogs is because my band, One Ring Zero, is gearing up to release a new album on Sept. 7th ... our first studio album in 3 years. The theme and title for this one is PLANETS. The album is a sort of revisit to our solar system, as the 100th anniversary of Holst's The Planets approaches. Here's some more info…
sciencepunk | August 7, 2010This is an adaptation of the talk I gave at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub on Monday 2nd August. You can hear an audio transcript of the talk at the Pod Delusion website.
I was invited to stage the talk again at the Winchester SITP, a recording of which is here.
I'm very much a child of the skeptical community. I started writing about bad science in 2004, in a scissors-and-glue zine titled War On Error (a very droll play on words at the time, and a lot easier than coming up with a twist on Overseas Contingency Operation). Eventually this moved online, morphing into SciencePunk. Over…
sciencepunk | August 2, 2010Tonight I'll be appearing at Westminster Skeptics in the Pub to present my talk: A Critique of Skepticism, which will discuss the ways that skeptics approach to communication is limiting our reach and excluding certain groups from the wider community.
WHERE?
The Monk Exchange
Strutton Ground
London
SW1H 0HW
WHEN?
Doors 7pm, everything kicks off at 7:30.
Hope to see you there, if not you can probably follow on Twitter.
sciencepunk | July 29, 2010The Smithsonian has an interesting article on Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin, revealing how the scientist used his bacterial cultures to paint works of art. Fleming used different bacterial strains to create a range of colours, timing his innoculations so that the different species would mature at the same time.
From the OP:
It is not clear why Fleming started painting microbes; perhaps he picked up a brush one day and noticed that it felt like the loop he used for his bacteria. Or maybe it was due to the promiscuous sexual predilections of artists. Fleming worked at…
sciencepunk | July 29, 2010
From Make:
Washington, DC artist Michele Banks, aka Artologica, is a painter who, in her own words, "uses an old and often-disrespected medium, watercolor, to create pieces that are anything but old-fashioned." Her works in Makers Market focus on biological and medical themes, particularly the microscopy of living cells.
sciencepunk | July 27, 2010Dezeen Magazine has the drop on this superb clock that shows the time in every time zone, using just one hand.
The clock is called Bent Hands and is designed by Giha Woo and Shingoeun.
Via Neatorama
sciencepunk | July 20, 2010A conversation cropped up on Twitter the other day about shared audiences. Specifically, Ed Yong and Alice Bell used this tool to compare the overlap in their followers.
So we science nerds wondered, how does that overlap look when you start adding in more bloggers? What is the shared audience between five, 10, 20 of the most prominent writers? This is very interesting to me, because I suspect that, even within a portal like ScienceBlogs, there is in fact very little sharing of audiences. Perhaps that's a reflection of the number of blogs people can reasonably follow. Maybe it's the…
sciencepunk | July 9, 2010
With apologies to Ed Yong; see his excellent piece: "Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp"
sciencepunk | July 1, 2010To celebrate Zombie Day at ScienceBlogs, I'm pleased to reveal a short excerpt from my forthcoming book Zombology: the new science of reanimation and mind control. I hope you enjoy it!
"Go, my dear Ernst," she said very gently; "go, and forget me. You might as well love a buried corpse as love a woman with such a fate as mine.""My love should have the power to magnetise the corpse into fresh life!"
--Ouida, The Massarenes
Death has always been seen as a permanent barrier that only the most divine could cross at will. For the rest of us mortals, it was intended to be a one-way trip, and…
sciencepunk | June 23, 2010This is a story about how a simple puzzle ended up haunting me for over 20 years. It's a story of hubris blocked by a mountain of cold mathematics, and the obsession spawned by knowing an answer is out there, but not knowing how to find it.
Growing on a remote island, my youthful thirst for new reading material was quenched in regular bursts from the Scholastic catalogue, a thrilling piece of folded A3 paper that flaunted great collections of tremendously exciting tomes on everything from monsters to maths. The best were the ones that combined the two.
Popular at the time, these…
sciencepunk | June 7, 2010If you could press your ear to a ladybird's chest, what would you hear? Not the steady thump thump of a human heart, but something quite different. Discovery News reports on work carried out by Igor Sokolov and his team at Clarkson University, who used an atomic force microscope to listen to the faint sounds emanating from inside living insects.
Listen to a ladybird
The researchers used this atomic stethoscope to record the internal sounds of other insects including a fly and a mosquito, which you can listen to here.
The work is published in Applied Physics Letters.
sciencepunk | June 7, 2010Last week I joined Brendon Connelly and Colin Murphy of the Pulse Project Podcast to discuss some of the week's science stories and chat about zombies, blogging and the origins of SciencePunk. Among the highlights are the sheer PR audacity of teaching an dolphin to communicate using an iPad and a guy who takes x-ray images of big things and alters them to fit the way we think the world should look in the x-ray spectrum. Safe to say it's an aural geekout!
You can follow the Pulse Project on Twitter and join them on Facebook. The organisation aims to "reflect and inform debates amongst…
sciencepunk | June 3, 2010Nature is big. Really big! The US National Weather Service revealed this image taken last Saturday showing a massive swarm of newly-hatched mayflies erupting from the Mississippi River near La Crosse, Wisconsin.
The swarm was captured using doppler radar, which is used to track the direction and velocity of distant objects (it's the same type of technology used by traffic police in speed guns). The National Weather Service says:
The bugs are showing up as bright pink, purple, and white colors along the Mississippi River mainly south of La Crosse, WI. After the bugs hatch off the water…
sciencepunk | June 1, 2010Last year I visited Ben Goldacre in his secret offshore nerdbase to talk about science. While there we set up the famous Barbie Detox experiment as described in his book Bad Science. In this short video Ben talks about why the bogus idea of detox is harmful not just for our bodies, but our understanding of health. Says Ben: "The answer, from the future king of England, to your health problems is a fucking magic potion. It's like something out of a fairy tale!"
sciencepunk | May 31, 2010Treehugger reports on the work of marine scientists at Brazil's Guaruja Aquarium, who have added a plastic window onto a shark egg so they can watch the fish develop.
In the photo above you can see the fetal bamboo shark attached to a large yolk sac. The video below gives a better view.
After noting that the unborn shark was unaffected by the window on its neonatal world, researchers removed the entire animal from its purse and allowed it to grow inside a perspex container. The work will help shed more light on how young sharks develop, an understanding of which is crucial to the…