A recent Twitter discussion with fellow nerd Joseph has reminded me about a post I’ve been meaning to stick up here for a while. We were comparing accounts of how optogenetics developed: one in Discover Magazine and one from the Faculty of 1000. The contrasting viewpoints are probably a story for another time; both pieces [read on...]
One of the great advantages of blogs is the opportunity they offer to react quickly to developments in science, the news, the courts, and so on. Considering I’m discussing the way a science paper was covered in the news three weeks ago, this blogpost misses that ideal of topicality by some distance – but I [read on...]
This week’s pic is one I snapped on a highland holiday – she’s a native resident of Lochcarron, although you can find plenty of her fellow garden spiders in, you guessed it, gardens all over Europe and North America. She’s also known as a cross orbweaver, diadem spider or – to you and me - Araneus [read on...]
In the last week there have been some alarming reports about the effect magnetic fields can have on unborn babies. Apparently ‘power lines’ and ‘electronic gadgets’ and ‘pylons [are] linked to babies’ asthma’. Really? I mean, really? Behind the scary headlines is a scary paper. It wasn’t misrepresented, or blown out of proportion. That’s really [read on...]
About this time each week, you would usually be regaled with a fresh blogpost from a member of Team Nerd. This week, however, there has been an unfortunate alignment of sub-optimal circumstances* and no such blogpost will be appearing. So here are some fun links about planes instead! Tenuous, I hear you say? Don’t even [read on...]
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a story sprinkled across several newspapers that, firstly, rang bells on a basic neuroscience level. It was about attention and hearing, two pretty fundamental duties of the brain and equally fundamental chapters in any neuroscience textbook. The second thing about it that got my attention was that [read on...]
Following the lead of Joe and George in previous weeks, my Nerd Alert post today is driven by my own (meandering) experience. It won’t contain any links to new science papers. This week there’s been no space in my life for reading the latest developments in neuroscience, or indeed any new science whatsoever. You [read on...]
This week, we bring you a printed skull. Yes, printed. 3D printing has been in the news a fair bit recently, with some justification: it’s really, really cool. It also comes in various forms. Many of the available methods, including the one used by 3DVentures to print this cross-sectioned skull, use a contraption surprisingly similar [read on...]
This blogpost is a bit of a jumble. I am hugely impressed by news of flu-resistant chickens, announced in yesterday’s Science – yet today I begrudgingly lunched on organically grown leeks. More on that later; let’s start with the chooks. There are many different flavours of bird flu, or avian influenza virus, and they are [read on...]
[fb-like] This time each week we usually beam another nerdy podcast your way, but there won’t be any new ones until January. In the meantime, please subscribe in iTunes, have a listen to some of our old shows, and check out this behind-the-scenes video that Pete made! Consider it the “bonus features” disc for the [read on...]