Category Archives: science

Can’t see a Coelacanth? Me neither

These designs just popped into my head. Will someone please make them for me? Sadly, it turns out that these beasts aren’t just ellusive, they are now also really endangered http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelacanth

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A physicist’s take on the meaning of life

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist and a science communicator. He’s a cosmologist with a particular interest in understanding what time is. He is also a vocal atheist who spends a fair bit of his own time arguing with philosophers … Continue reading

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From Disney Imagineer to killing thousands of mice with cancer

It seems unlikely that supergenius Danny Hillis was unhappy with his time as a Disney ‘Imagineer’ . Where, according to this week’s Nature, he got to do very cool things like design themepark rides. But I wonder what Mickey thinks about … Continue reading

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The Quietest Place on Earth Will Drive You Insane Within 45 Minutes

This Gizmodo story makes a nice follow up to saturday’s prose poem. Maybe that wasn’t fiction after all? There’s a small room in Minnesota that blocks out 99% of all external sound. That’s an impressive number! Also impressive: nobody can … Continue reading

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For dolphins, seafood tastes salty.

New research in top science journal PNAS suggests that carnivores can’t taste very much. This is particularly bad news for dolphins. Humans and many other mammals have five types of taste receptors – sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami (savoury … Continue reading

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Comfort or Food? The Harlow Monkey Love Song

Anyone who gets through first year psychology will be familiar with Harry Harlow and his cruel experiments with rhesus monkeys. Little orphan monkeys were given the choice between a wire surrogate mother who provided food and a terry cloth surrogate … Continue reading

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What Einstein really thought about God..

“The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is … Continue reading

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Flying spaghetti monster photographed for the first time

For those that doubted the existence of the flying spaghetti monster, scientists have managed to photograph him. And the reality is more amazing than you can have imagined.. He really is out there floating in space spanning the whole universe. … Continue reading

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More top croc news

Now the exciting world of crocodile classification has just become twice as complicated. It used to be that it was easy to tell crocodiles from alligators. If you were in Africa it was a crocodile. Now it turns out that … Continue reading

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Alligators, Crocodiles and Babies?

          Fake Science : What’s The Difference Between The Alligator And Crocodile? This was news to me. And I wrote a fair bit of about alligators, crocodiles and babies in my PhD (with a little help … Continue reading

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The Meaning of Life (in Under 300 Words)

It turns out some psychologists (Baumeister and Vohs, 2002) have found the meaning of life. Psychologists are much more pragmatic than philosophers. Rather than working out the meaning of life from first principles or anything daft like that they just went … Continue reading

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Sweet statistics stuff from Nausicaa Distribution

  Etsy seller Nausicaa Distribution have all kinds of great statistics based products. Pillows, posters, pencilcases, you named, they’re likely to have it.    Gang of 5 evil distribution plushies Set of 5 Statistics Propaganda Posters by NausicaaDistribution.

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Beauty, Charm, and Strangeness: Science as Metaphor

Thanks to Nathan Yau at Flowing Data for pointing me in the direction of this 1998 essay by John Banville for Science magazine.  He draws parallels between art and science. I wish to advance a thesis which, were they to … Continue reading

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Joshua Foer @LSE – The End of Remembering – Tues, 5th April 6:30pm

There is an interesting talk at the LSE on Tuesday, 5th April 6:30 Once upon a time remembering was everything. Today, we have endless mountains of documents, the Internet and ever-present smart phones to store our memories. As our culture … Continue reading

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Life, Unbounded: All you need to know about 2,000 years of astrobiology

Caleb Scharf has just finished his superb sequence of the ten most important question in astrobiology. They are all good, but the end is a good place to begin: Metrodoru, the first astrobiologist? From Pergammon, Berlin, Image via Wikipedia The … Continue reading

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