SciencePunk
Falling Walls: Aaron Kaplan explains how mesh networks route around censorship
Posted by Frank Swain on November 9, 2012 Aaron Kaplan is rather in awe of being invited to the Falling Walls conference for what he calls his “hobby project”. But not all of us can boast a hobby that connects hundreds of thousands of people to the internet in a democratic, decentralised fashion. He is the founder of Funk Feuer, a peer-to-peer mesh…
Falling Walls: Google’s Hal R. Varian on finding truth in search queries
Posted by Frank Swain on November 9, 2012 Perhaps having anticipated some bleary eyes in the audience following last night’s reception cocktails, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian starts his Falling Walls lecture with a question: what day of the week are the most Google searches for “hangover”? The answer is, unsurprisingly, Sunday, a fact revealed by Google’s Trends platform,…
Woman grows a “scrotum”, loses husband
Posted by Frank Swain on November 2, 2012 From the Annals of the Weird, or more precisely Proceedings in Obstetrics and Gynecology, comes the story of a 21-year-old woman from rural India presenting a benign vulvar tumour resembling a “soft, pedunculated mass, with a wrinkled surface dangling from her left labia majus” about the size of a tennis ball. She had been abandoned by her husband,…
Cartoons based on protein structures
Posted by Frank Swain on October 29, 2012 May K is a Russian artist living in Germany who draws cartoons based on the structure of proteins. Below is Bedouin Riding a Camel, which as it happens, is based on a protein found in a dromedary: You can see more examples at her website, Protein-Art.com
Little cakeshop of horrors
Posted by Frank Swain on October 25, 2012 From London’s Pathology Museum at St Bart’s Hospital: the Eat Your Heart Out Pop-Up Cake Shop, where the foul fondants and fancies reflect various medical conditions and other disease detritus. Below: varicose vein cupcakes.
Putting a Hex on Hitler, 1941
Posted by Frank Swain on October 23, 2012 William Seabrook achieved fame in the early 20th century as a man willing to travel the world in search of adventure (and drink), eating with cannibals in West Africa and uncovering the Haitian zombie. His fascination with the occult and witchcraft guided many of his travels, and he was guest of honour at a remote…
Why are doctors silent?
Posted by Frank Swain on October 19, 2012 I thought this was a really interesting piece, and a very important one to anyone interested in public healthcare. The original source appears to be a Moscow paramedic writing under a pseudonym. Apologies for the machine translation, but you get the main points. – The secret side of medicine or why doctors are silent? In recent years,…
Shoes with human teeth
Posted by Frank Swain on October 11, 2012 My Design Stories has the scoop on these handsome shoes: British studio fantich and young have re-interepreted the humble dinner shoe by replacing a regular rubber sole with hundreds of dentures. The ‘apex predator shoe’ transforms the elegant savile row oxford shoe, inlaying 1050 fake teeth and accompanies an entire suit made of human hair…
Wasps are evil.
Posted by Frank Swain on October 9, 2012 So I’ve peeled my calendar off the wall where the persistent, driving rain has seeped into the brickwork and glued it into place, and what do you know, summer’s over! And thankfully, all that rain drove away the wasps. Do you realise how fortunate you are? Yeah, I’m talking about these little buzzing slivers of…
Unfollowing
Posted by Frank Swain on October 5, 2012 So a couple of weeks ago I unfollowed every science-type person in my Twitter feed. Not because I don’t like them, in fact, many were friends and colleagues. But there’s something sickly in the online science community, and this was an experiment in ways I might build around that. I have mixed feelings about Twitter.…