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.
- Commenting on scientific papers - July 27, 2008 → BioMedCentral has had online paper comments (like blog comments) since 2002, now Nature publishing is going to go all web 2.0 with its journals and launch commenting. Check out this analysis of BMC commenting from the Nascent blog.
- Detox damage - July 23, 2008 → A woman who was left brain damaged and epileptic after going on the Amazing Rehydration Diet has been awarded more than £800,000 damages at the High Court. the so-called detox diet involves massively increasing water intake and cutting out salt.
- Wear sunscreen? - July 22, 2008 → Wear sunscreen? It might be safer to go without. Just don’t get burned.
- Moving music - July 21, 2008 → The mood of a piece of music could depend on the relative velocities of the audience and performers as relative motion induces a Doppler effect making notes that sound “happy” into ones that sound sad, depending on the shifting pitch.
- APS skepticism - July 18, 2008 → The American Physical Society published a newsletter in which it essentially reverse its stance on climate change: “There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.” Consensus, what consensus?
- Solar boost - July 18, 2008 → US scientists have boosted the output of photovoltaic solar cells by up to an order of magnitude using organic dyes to concentrate sunlight.
- A fishy story of evolution - July 18, 2008 → The evolution of human speech began with our fish ancestors, report Cornell University researchers. From the humblest hums of the amorous midshipman fish to the dulcet tones of Geddy Lee…
- Paul Buchheit asks - July 18, 2008 → Did the alchemists actually believe that they could turn lead into gold, or was that just a good way to raise money to fund their labs?
- DNA is meaningless - July 17, 2008 → DNA is meaningless if viewed at the genes and genomics level of abstraction.
- Logical chemical communications - July 15, 2008 → A simple glowing molecule that can carry out logical operations of the kind used in encoding the data transmitted down fiber-optic cables for voice and internet connections has been created by Italian chemists.
- Alchemical occurrences - July 12, 2008 → This week, The Alchemist rises to the lure of healthy watermelons, learns how a 12-year-old project has solved a greenhouse mystery, and reflects on Raman spectroscopy for a sensitivity boost. Also in the news this week, could a role for the cholesterol-lowering statins lie in their ability to boost the brain’s “stem cells”? And, could copper nanorods lead to huge energy savings for the chemical industry by speeding up boiling processes?
- Peel a hard-boiled egg without peeling - July 11, 2008 → Why don’t they teach this stuff in school? I don’t know why raising the pH would make any difference at the end of the boiling process when you cool the eggs with ice, but, great technique nevertheless.
- Old drugs, new tricks - June 11, 2008 → Chemical computations are allowing drug researchers to uncover similar side-effects in different drugs. On this basis, they say, it might be possible to find out whether old drugs could be re-marketed for new diseases.
- Scientists heart journalists - July 11, 2008 → Do scientists actually really like journalists?
- Puzzling over climate pH - July 8, 2008 → Is a tiny change in oceanic pH due to rising levels of CO2 such a problem or is it just a drop in the ocean. The “pH” is the negative logarithm of the hydrogen ion concentration in moles per liter. A pH of 8 means water has 0.00000001 moles per liter of hydrogen ion, one tenth of what it would have at a pH of seven, 0.0000001 moles/liter. A pH of 8.2 means the hydrogen ion concentration is 0.000000006 or the solution has changed by 0.000000004 moles/liter in 100 years. This is 0.00000000004 or 4 X 10^-11 moles/year. With the point being this is an exceedingly small amount of anything and an undetectable amount of hydrogen ion in the oceans.
- Brain Freeze - July 6, 2008 → I know words like brainstorm are no longer PC, but hopefully, the transient disorder known as brain freeze has not been added to the list of motto non gratis. Anyway, find out about the science of brain freeze here.
- Honeycomb candy chemistry - July 7, 2008 → Forget the vinegar and bicarb volcano, that’s essentially inedible, instead froth up some candy with a massive blast of CO2.
- Maritime stroke - July 3, 2008 → A southern Ontario woman who had a stroke and who has never been anywhere near the East Coast, has no connection with it and has lived her whole life in southern Ontario has developed a Canadian Maritime accent…it’s an odd case of foreign-accent syndrome (FAS), which occurs rarely in stroke victims when they regain speech but talk with a different accent to their original one.
- Roughage - July 3, 2008 → Roughage, that’s what my grandmother used to call it, and it’s essential in your diet if you’re to have a good solid daily sabbatical in the realm of porcelain and U-bends. Now, however, it’s known as dietary fibre and porridge is no longer the primary source. Instead, dates, fenugreek, purslane and sweet potato greens are emerging in places like the United Arab Emirates to add a healthier twist to cookies and muffins made with date flour.
- Global warming scepticism - July 2, 2008 → Could received wisdom and a failure of the skeptic gene among scientists mean we could miss something serious and truly catastrophic in terms of climate change and non-human effects?
- Psycho shrooms - July 1, 2008 → The psychotropic, so-called “spiritual” effects of sacred mushrooms containing the hallucinogen psilocybin can last for up to a year, new research shows. Writing in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, the Johns Hopkins researchers note that most of the 36 volunteer subjects given psilocybin, under controlled conditions in a Hopkins study published in 2006, continued to say 14 months later that the experience increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.
- Spinal math - July 1, 2008 → It’s taken a complete mathematical theory to come to the conclusion that back pain and injuries can arise when your spine is jolted…hmmm…another one for the Annals of the Bleedin’ Obvious.
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