Science Extra Geeky Bits from David Bradley
Grab my Geeky Bits in a news reader
The latest science extra Geeky Bits news from Sciencebase's David Bradley. The most recent 30 days of news snippets, worthies and oddities, as well as other items of interest that didn't make it on to the Sciencebase Science Blog homepage because I was (a) too busy to do a full write-up (b) too lazy to do a full write-up (c) too bored to do a full write-up. Visit the Science Extra Geeky Bits Archive for all items posted during the last year.
- Pheromone and LUSH - June 30, 2008 → Pheromones don’t necessarily work the way we thought, new fruitfly research suggests a free-floating protein called LUSH may be involved.
- High-flying bra - JUne 30, 2008 → The designers of an inflatable bra from wayback when didn’t count on unpressurised air travel…
- Zabow collage - June 26, 2008 → NIST scientist Gary Zabow is doing some excellent research on colourising MRI using microscopic magnets, but this “photo” of the Zabow team does not do justice to NIST’s Photoshop skills!
- Google wires science - June 25, 2008 → Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.
- The Botulinum Journal - June 24, 2008 → What do the death of three ham-eating musicians at a nineteenth century funeral wake in France and the hammy attempts of aging stars to appear younger than they really are have in common? Botulinum toxin, or Botox, to you and me, of course. And, now a call for papers from an intriguing new journal, Botulinum J, has just been announced, aimed at provides an international forum and refereed authoritative source of information encompassing varied fields, including microbiology, biochemistry, biophysics, biotechnology, proteomics, genomics, pharmacology, toxicology, drug development related to different forms and types of botulinum neurotoxins, and also Clostridium botulinum.
- Elsevier cross checking journals - June 24, 2008 → Uber STM publisher Elsevier, is to implement CrossCheck, the plagiarism detection service offered by CrossRef in collaboration with iParadigms. Plagiarism is high on the academic agenda these days and featured prominently in the disgracing of a psy-med writer this month, so Elsevier and CrossCheck will develop, pilot and implement, a single database of published articles enabling publishers to easily verify the originality of submitted and published work.
- Artificial coral reefs - June 23, 2008 → Are artificial reefs good for the environment? Some scientists say yes, but others are not so sure. As with all such interventionist supposedly environment-saving activities, there are two sides to every idea.
- ticTOCs - June 23, 2008 → Although it’s possible to create a bunch of Yahoo Pipes to gather together journal tables of contents (Tocs) this site created by Roddy McLeod and others allows you to create timely alerts (hence ticTOCS) for almost 8000 academic journals.
- Global chilling - June 20, 2008 → Could they have got it all wrong, is global cooling the order of the day? It certainly feels like it here today…flaming June, my hat!
- Ice on Mars - June 20, 2008 → Could the Phoenix lander have scraped up some water ice on Mars? Possibly.
- FDA cancer crackdown - June 19, 2008 → The US Food & Drug Administration is to clamp down on bogus cancer cures, the kind I’ve mentioned scathingly in Sciencebase before.
- JotBO - Cleaner beaches nicer - June 19, 2008 → An astounding bit of research apparently shows that “Most beachgoers prefer beaches with pleasant views and clean water and sand.” The implication of that statement from the press release is that some beachgoers prefer unpleasant views, dirty water and sand.
- A healthy dose of radiation - June 19, 2008 → For decades, we have been told that exposure to radiation is dangerous. In high doses it is certainly lethal and chronic exposure is linked to the development of cancer. But, what if a short-term controlled exposure to a low dose of radiation were good for our health. Writing in today’s issue of the Inderscience publication the International Journal of Low Radiation, Don Luckey, makes the startling claim that low dose radiation could be just what the doctor ordered!
- Hosts put up many barriers to block microbes - June 17, 2008 → RNA viruses are highly error prone, and can use their replication infidelity to adapt to complex environments within an infected host. However, viral populations may experience bottlenecks, which limit their diversity and potentially reduce their virulence. Researchers have now looked at polio virus in mice and have demonstrated that hosts put up multiple natural barriers to limit the spread of microbes.
- TGN1412 drug trial dad - June 16, 2008 → One of the survivors of the disastrous TGN1412 drug trial has become a dad aged 37, more than two years since suffering a severe adverse drug reaction to the experimental immune system modulator.
- Triple super-earths - June 16, 2008 → A triple system of super-Earths around the star HD 40307 has been revealed with the HARPS astronomical instrument. The entire sample studied revealed a total of 45 candidate planets with a mass below 30 Earth masses and an orbital period shorter than 50 days. This implies that one solar-like star out of three harbours such planets.
- Why is the Sun sleeping? June 11, 2008 → Scientists are not sure why the Sun “continues to be dead”, no sunspots, no big bursts of radiation…is this the end of the wor
- Location, location, location - June 11, 2008 → Cellphone records reveal the basic pattern of human mobility. More from the arXiv physics preprint server blog…
- Chemistry Definitions - June 10, 2008 → I’ve added a whole range of new search tools to the Sciencebase site on this chemistry definitions page. Here, you can look up acronyms, chemical prices, chemical companies, MSDS safety data sheets, chemistry journals, patents, find chemistry definitions in dictionaries (gold book type stuff), abbreviations databases, spectroscopic properties, physical properties of compounds and elements (rubber handbook type data), and even find chemistry jobs.
- Spooking the International Space Station - June 9, 2008 → A test of quantum spooky action at a distance could be carried out by an astronaut on the ISS and a ground-based observer.
- Top fuel saving tips - June 6, 2008 → Some obvious and some not-so-obvious ideas on how to save car fuel now that Brits are paying more than $10 per gallon!
- This cracked me up - June 5, 2008 → Using fractures in sidewalks as an analog for natural outcrops, students learn to make systematic observations, measure the orientation and location of fractures, manipulate and analyze data, and consider some kinematic and dynamic questions regarding the origin and significance of fractures.
- Inorganic viper - Jun 3, 2008 → This inorganic lot certainly don’t shy away from acronyms and abbbreviations, the inorganic VIPER- Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource copes from Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists (IONIC) and was created by Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education (CECPIICE).
- Alchemist Newsletter - June 2, 2008 → My Alchemist column on Chemweb.com posted while I was on vacation, so linking a couple of days late…
- The Googling Genie - May 2, 2008 → Now live, the 32nd edition of the Gene Genie blog carnival, which is devoted to genes and genetic disease. This latest edition covers 23andMe, suicide, Schwann cells, Eye on DNA and much more.
- Settling the score - June 1, 2008 → Modern science, mp3 compression and a string symphony
David Bradley
Site FAQ
Contact me
Email updates
Free updates
Social Networking
Digital Podcast
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
My recent reading
Join my LinkedIn network
Connect on StumbleUpon
Poke me on Facebook
Follow my Plurks
My Flickr gallery
Sciencebase on Twitter
Be my Feed Friend
