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 think it’s an interesting little example so I’m posting it anyway. A little while ago, the auditory cortex was in the news. For an auditory [read on...]
While we’re on the job of self snapped shots, I took this little pic of mushies a couple of months back in Cardiff. Being a foreigner to these strange isles, I have no idea what sort these actually are. Needless to say I didn’t bother munching any. Mushrooms are the spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus. Fungi are a fantastically diverse bunch; they can taste yummy, make antibiotics, be hugely poisonous or even elicit some trippy psychedelia. One particular type [read on...]
While standing outside a party the other night, basking in the eerie glow of a moon halo, a good friend of mine who has a penchant for skepticism of science turned to me and said, “You realize that science works on an honour system, right? If a scientist makes some stuff up, more often than not, no one’s ever going to find out.” Usually comments like this from him are my cue to stand up and be the champion to [read on...]
I fear I have turned into a naïve idealist. I’m concerned about the increasingly blurred line between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ actions of big corporations, and saddened that science lies at the heart of it. [A disclaimer: I am aware that there are a plethora of companies who strive for success strictly through ethical practices, and I am not anti-business]. An obvious example is the science of killing people. I might say I think we’re spending an insane amount of public [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 diadematus. Common they may be, but these ladies (the gents are smaller and don’t spin webs) are pretty impressive engineers. The first, anchoring thread [read on...]
These are time lapse sequences taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station during August and October. The combination of city lights, aurora and thunderstorms from space are simply mesmerizing. A super fun game is to try and guess the location of each sequence from the visible land masses. I’ll post them below the vid. For full trippyness you may want to click through to watch it in HD on the vimeo site. 1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United [read on...]
The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of distorted colliding galaxies about 70 million light years away in the constellation of the Crow. This picture combines observations made by the Hubble telescope in the visible spectrum (blue) with preliminary observations collected at submillimetre wavelengths (red and yellow) by only 12 of what will eventually be 66 of ALMA’s antennaes. Although the resolution of ALMA can’t yet compare to that offered by Hubble, it can do something Hubble can’t – detect the [read on...]
Four antennas of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) gaze up at the star-filled night sky. The Moon is visible to the right whilst the Milky Way can be seen stretching across the upper left. ALMA, consisting of 66 antennas, is being built at an altitude of 5000m way up on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama desert is one of the driest spots on earth. This combined with the thin atmosphere at high altitude means [read on...]
We’ve all suffered that terrifying moment during our research when we’ve been asked what it is we’re actually doing. There’s that slight awkward pause, the sucking-in of breath through the teeth, and then… we bust out the moves and interpretive dance our way to an explanation. Right? Well, maybe not. But that’s the premise of Gonzolabs‘ annual Dance Your PhD contest. The objective – as if it needs clarifying – is to get PhD students to translate their thesis into [read on...]
This awesome image, by Chris Kotsiopoulos, was taken during an eclipse of the moon on the Greek island of Ikaria at Pezi. The area is know as the planet of the goats for its strange shaped rocks and rough terrain. Big rocks, an eclipse and lightning storm make for some trippy subject material. by joseph
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