Schrödinger's Kitten
Irreverent Science for Everyone
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It Might Be Climate, But It's Not Science
Leaked correspondence and data from one of the world's leading climate research institutes casts doubts about the validity of their data. Some of their big names in man-made climate change, and on the IPCC, are involved. Climate skeptics are having a field day. Environmentalists are attacked by sneaking worries. No valid explanation given.
Beyond Rainbow Country
Red and yellow and pink and green, orange and purple and blue...
As well as being a highly dull song, it's also incomplete and what it does include is wrong. If you can show me the location of pink in the rainbow, you can have a cookie.
However, if they're drivelling about colour in general, there's a deeper issue afoot. There are colours beyond "all the colours of the rainbow" and we rather like them.
Which Subatomic Particle Are You?
We all know that the only way to understand our innermost nature better is not in fact psychotherapy, meditation or a bold and fearless examination of your innermost self, but to take many, many tests on The Internets in order to find out which noun we are. But usually, these tests lack scientific rigour. This personality quiz attempts to fill the gap by connecting you to an archetypal building block of the universe, which must be way more scientific and accurate than a Sex and the City character.
Why Yes, We Scientists Have A Death Wish And We Are Taking You With Us
I have just discovered a group on Facebook entitled 'Don't Bomb The Moon'. Under the elegant summation "NASA is planning to bomb the moon... join this group to stop it happening" aided by the haiku-like sparsity and poetic licence of:
The moon controls all the tides and time... hitting it with a bomb could be really dangerous.. join to help!!!!
...you could be forgiven for thinking there was something worth worrying about. If, that is, you were convinced that all the scientific minds at NASA, and their academic consultants, were out to get their measurements whether or not it involved imperilling the human race. I mean, even assuming they'd be able to analyse them in the absence of civilisation as we know it, where would they publish?
Testing Animal Testing
Pretty much everyone agrees that animal testing should be less cruel and, if possible, avoided. But this simple proposition opens a whole can of worms (...and daphnia, and drosophilia, and other quickly-reproducing invertebrates...). How do we minimise animals' suffering when we have no idea when they are suffering? Humans aren't great at taking animals on their own terms; witness all those dog owners who think their canine friend hatches vindictive plots to punish them for going out without them. For years it was thought that reptiles were crap at learning, but once they were offered rewards that actually appealed to them (heat lamps rather than food rewards) they suddenly improved. Some animal researchers don't even believe that animals *are* conscious. And then there's the issue of interspecies comparisons — is it better to test on 1,000 zebrafish, or one cat?
The Lack of Perspective Vortex
The first thing I did when I got to university was measure the charge mass ratio of the electron. Well, actually, the first thing I did was to take off my top hat and start messing my room up, but the first thing I did in labs was that. I then proceeded to spend four years peering indecently closely at the components of nature, either measuring them, calculating with them, or cursing their discoverers. After that, I fear I may have got a bit blasé about minute measurements. You know you've got a problem when you consider 100 nanometres to be 'quite big, really', an additional nanosecond a day to be worth worrying about, and a 0.1 degree difference to affect your cooking.
Death to the Unnecessarily Complicated Measuring Units of the Imperium
We have almost — almost — banished ridiculous measuring systems based on the length of the king's foot or the Babylonians' favourite number, or whatever, in favour of a nice, consistent metric. A few backwaters remain cough US cough but most of the world uses SI (International System) units for science and buying milk.
For example, this gives us the liquid volume unit the litre. A thousandth of a litre of water, which I hear the kids are calling a 'millilitre', weighs a gram and has a volume of one cubic centimetre. This leads painlessly to the useful result that a litre of water weighs a kilogram, and has a volume equivalent to a 10cm sided cube — or a thousandth of a metre cubed. So a metre cubed of water weighs one thousand kilograms, which we call a ton.
The Fruit Is A Lie
We all know, I think, that a tomato is a fruit not a vegetable. It’s the sort of amazing fact printed on cereal boxes to amuse and entertain children with very low standards. The distinction is, so I fuzzily recall, that fruit are part of reproduction, whereas a vegetable is any other botanical bit we eat. Thus, fruit have seeds inside, veg don’t — veg can be leaves (cabbage), roots (parsnip) or buds (sprouts).
5 Things I Didn't, And You Probably Didn't, Know About CERN
I was lucky enough to go to CERN last week. Unfortunately I was there for work, which meant I couldn't harass particle physicists as much as I wanted to, but I did get to see the Compact Muon Solenoid (compact as in only 15 metres tall), and I did learn some things I did not know, despite being a particle physics/CERN fangirl.
Since I was very little I have known of CERN — my dad's best friend worked there — and since I read my first book on particle physics (circa 8 years old) I have wanted to work in it. So I was very excited. We're talking squealing, jumping up and down, planning my pillaging of the guest shoppe, etc. With my camera batteries fully charged I set off...
Amateur Mosquito Investigation Part 2 (or The Biting Bastards are Truly Bastards)
Slight delay in results caused by being out of the country and applying for paying jobs.1 However I'm sure you'll be glad to hear that I have the results of the first experiment. For those who've forgotten, that's: