Jan 30, 2008
Posted in Health at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 6 Comments; add yours
I’ve just finished writing a news article for the SpectroscopyNOW.com MRI ezine and wanted to expand on some of the implications of the work here. The item describes the results of recent research that purportedly show differences in how born-and-bred Americans differed from immigrant East Asians tackling a simple visual test based on displayed sequences of boxes and lines.
The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study looked at differences …
Jan 29, 2008
Posted in Chemspy at 8:04 am by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours
As a journalist, I receive a lot of press releases that cite “forthcoming” papers. Depending on the publisher one can usually find the paper in a pre-press state on their website. However, it’s often the case that the DOI does not go live at the same time as the embargo expires on the press release, and so I might legitimately publish an article about the research I cannot use the DOI as the reference and …
Jan 28, 2008
Posted in Geek at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 4 Comments; add yours
Currently, the only truly effective way consumers can stop the collection of their personal data when shopping is not to use the internet, to be paid and to pay for everything in cash, and to hide their money in their mattress.
More seriously, most of us will continue to use web services despite privacy concerns. You can try to opt-out of marketing schemes or reconfigure your web browser to reject advances …
Jan 25, 2008
Posted in Science at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 3 Comments; add yours
If you have ever wondered what gets people chatting on the Sciencebase Blog and why the site has now passed the 3000 newsfeed subscriber point, then you might like to check out this selection of recent posts that, according to a neat little Wordpress plugin are the posts with the most comments. Actually Alex King’s Popularity Contest can do the same thing.
It makes for interesting reading, …
Jan 23, 2008
Posted in Geek at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 1 Comment
I usually ignore the comment spam folders on this website as per my own advice. Occasionally, however, I will scan them quickly. I do so if a regular reader has commented and has emailed to say that their comment is yet to appear. Legitimate words do sometimes get caught in the Akismet netting. I can then add the individual to the filter whitelist and …
Jan 21, 2008
Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours
Where online do you turn, when you are looking for a periodic table?
The domain name PeriodicTable.com - reveals a superb online periodic table with an obvious website name and the option to buy a poster printout.
For more on what Periodic Tables mean and their underlying formulations check out Periodic Table Formulations by Mark Leach
Berkeley nuclear chemist Mitch Garcia who runs ChemicalForums.com, would, as would …
Posted in Chemspy at 11:16 am by chemspy -- 1 Comment
We’ve all sat through lectures, talks, and symposia that went on too long, some of us may even have been guilty of overrunning! Blogging chemist Andrew Sun was worried about this problem and hunted across the Internet in search of a countdown timer that could be run on one’s desktop to alert a speaker to the time they have left. Unfortunately, while there are many timers available online, most of them are either less …
Jan 20, 2008
Posted in Chemspy at 7:06 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
The web domain http://research.google.com is set to become a repository for terabytes of open-source scientific data. It’s like a billion-fold expansion of the virtual GDrive available to GMail users with a neat little hack. According to sources, “The storage will be free to scientists and access to the data will be free for all.”
Apparently, Palimpsest (project codename) was actually previewed at the Googleplex Science Foo camp in August 2007 but, according to Wired magazine, has …
Jan 18, 2008
Posted in Science at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 9 Comments; add yours
The research of Arpad Putzai about a decade ago in which he fed genetically modified potatoes to rats and purportedly observed deleterious effects, kicked off the whole anti-GM movement in the UK. In a recent Guardian interview with Pusztai, his current position on the subject is probably best summed up by an early quote from the interview:
“We’re eating things that we haven’t eaten before, and I challenge …
Jan 16, 2008
Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours
Diamond is not unique! Nature’s missing crystal discovered! A crystal as beautiful as diamond! Those were the themes running through dozens of articles in the media about a discovery made by Japanese mathematician Toshi Sunada of Meiji University. The original press release proclaimed that he had discovered a theoretical crystal structure with the same symmetry properties as diamond but with handedness, or chirality, and that this knocked the …
Posted in Chemspy at 10:07 am by chemspy -- Click to comment
The US’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a Public Access Policy that is set to become mandatory following President Bush’s approval on Dec 26th 2007. This change will mean that NIH-funded researchers will be obliged to submit an electronic version of any of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, as soon as the paper has been accepted for publication in a journal.
Many researchers are pleased with the move and Peter Suber outlines the …
Jan 14, 2008
Posted in Health at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 19 Comments; add yours
We probably all know at least one person who swears by their magnetic charm bracelet for preventing travel sickness, reducing arthritic pain or even helping them through situations that induce an attack of social anxiety disorder. These bracelets and other devices (some are in the form of headbands, others pendants, blankets, knee braces, shoe inserts, there’s even one you wear in your pants to improve your sex life) use magnets …
Jan 11, 2008
Posted in Science at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 5 Comments; add yours
Swarms of satellites each weighing less than 100 grams and not much bigger than a personal digital assistant or even a cell phone could soon be heading for space. These so-called femto satellites could quickly displace the behemoths of yesteryear that weigh in at up to a tonne and may revolutionize applications in telecommunications, military, entertainment, science, weather and climate forecasting, at much …
Jan 9, 2008
Posted in Geek at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- Click to comment
I am currently writing a post about pico and femto satellites for Sciencebase, these devices are tiny compared to the enormous one tonne behemoths many of us would picture if asked to visualise an artificial satellite (more on that later). Anyway, the earth’s escape velocity at sea level from a standing start was a figure I needed to hand while writing the piece.
I found a …
Posted in Chemspy at 8:26 am by chemspy -- 2 Comments; add yours
Not so much a chemical information post today as a diatribe against natural terminology used by the countless chemophobes out there.
I had a query this morning from a reader asking whether adding bleach to the water used with their cut, fresh flowers would reduce fungal infections and so somehow prolong their bloom time. I suspect there’s probably a drop of truth in the idea, but in trying to find a definitive answer I found a …
Jan 8, 2008
Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 7 Comments; add yours
Why do they grit the roads with rock salt in winter? What does the salt do to the water to reduce ice on the roads? Is this somehow related to how salt affects the boiling point of water? Keywords to search for: colligative properties, boiling, freezing, ions, solutions, solvent, Raoult’s law
Meanwhile, I’ll let Plasticine models from Ithaca and cheesy music explain:…
Jan 7, 2008
Posted in Geek at 8:00 pm by David Bradley -- 7 Comments; add yours
As Russ Swan of Laboratory Talk pointed out in reference to my previous post on the redundancy of the phrase “male semen”, there are numerous other examples around. For instance, the phrase HIV virus is equally redundant as it literally says, “human immunodeficiency virus virus”, likewise ATM machine (automated teller machine machine), PIN number (personal identification number number) and the Sierra Nevada …
Posted in Health at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 9 Comments; add yours
Just before the Christmas break, right as my annual winter festival cold kicked in and I was up to my neck in end of year deadlines, I posted a link to a press release in my Geeky Bits science extra column. That page is a repository of the less worthy, but hopefully interesting stuff I come across. Occasionally, I see an intriguing headline, give it a click, …
Jan 4, 2008
Posted in Geek at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 7 Comments; add yours
In the spirit of recent posts about conversational spam and other such topics, I thought I’d let you into a little secret. My blog comment spam folder fills up every day but thanks to Akismet you never get to see the spam on the blog itself. Same goes for my GMail account spam folder (I route all email through it for that very reason). You probably find the same. …
Posted in Chemspy at 12:14 pm by chemspy -- 1 Comment
Firefox-using molecular biologist kinda person? Then, you should check out BioFox (thanks for Bertalan Meskó of ScienceRoll for the tip off).
Code bioFOX integrates various bioinformatics tools into the Firefox web browser, allowing users to analyse genes without all the hassle of retrieving data from NCBI or Swiss-Prot and can then manipulate the information via various tasks including: Translation of a nucleotide sequence, blast search (For eg. blastn, blastp etc.) of the desired nucleotide/protein sequence, …
Jan 3, 2008
Posted in Chemspy at 4:56 pm by chemspy -- Click to comment
For those who care about such things as online social networking, and if you’re reading this blog, I assume that could be you, there is now a Facebook application available that allows you to cite your journal publications (provided they are listed in PubMed).
You can add the Medline Application (yes, I realize PubMed and Medline are not synonymous, but that’s the name the authors used) - by following this link.
I’ve added a few …
Jan 2, 2008
Posted in Chemistry at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours
During my time at the Royal Society of Chemistry (do I sometimes make it sound like a prison sentence?), I watched in awe as my old mucker Andrew Wilkinson helped reformulate the IUPAC book of chemical definitions commonly known as the Gold Book. That mighty auric tome is online and searchable with a click these days. And is as useful as ever to chemists looking …
Jan 1, 2008
Posted in Astronomy at 1:00 pm by David Bradley -- 8 Comments; add yours
Have you ever come across this kind of description of an astronomical event?
“…astronomers have witnessed a supermassive black hole blasting its galactic neighbor with a deadly beam of energy…Both galaxies are situated about 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth…The offending galaxy probably began assaulting its companion about 1 million years ago…”
How can that be, asks Sciencebase reader Adam Azman. If the event is at a …
Posted in Geek at 10:07 am by David Bradley -- Click to comment
RSSHugger is offering bloggers a free entry in their directory in exchange for a review in one’s blog. So, aside from my reservations about their name - sounds like tree huggers or rugger buggers to me, do check them out, they’re “way cool” as my teenage son would say. I’m hoping this review will get Sciencebase into the directory before they reach the 1000 entries mark (a way to go at the time of …
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