Knoxville '82: Where Miscellany Thrive
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Category archives for Knoxville ’82: Where Miscellany Thrive
Lithuanian Biophysics: Small Rooms, Big Science
Posted by Vince LiCata on June 28, 2012 I recently spent a week in Lithuania visiting biophysical laboratories and giving a couple of seminars. My host was Daumantas Matulis of the Institute of Biotechnology at Vilnius University, where they have an EU grant that includes funds for bringing in visiting scientists from other countries (thank you EU!). Although my sampling of the science…
Hands Off Introductory Biology
Posted by Vince LiCata on January 30, 2012 A news story in ScienceNOW this week describes how City University of New York is planning to rearrange its “General Education” requirements so that non-majors who take science don’t have to take lab courses anymore. Scientists at CUNY are, predictably, annoyed and upset. Even non-majors should get to muck around in lab with their own…
DNA Repair and Thermodynamics – Paper Up
Posted by Vince LiCata on September 23, 2011 Yanling Yang, who just graduated with a Ph.D. from my lab, has a paper in the just published November issue of Biophysical Chemistry. The entire issue of the journal celebrates the 25th Anniversary of a conference called “The Gibbs Conference on Biothermodynamics”, and each of the papers is from the laboratory of one of the…
Dance Your Ph.D. -2011
Posted by Vince LiCata on September 4, 2011 The “Dance Your Ph.D.” contest is on again for 2011. This unusual and highly interesting experiment in science outreach continues to be shepherded by John Bohannon, and continues to attract new sponsors — this years sponsor is TEDx Brussels. So what is this? Basically: you create an interpretive dance that “explains” your Ph.D. research and…
The Fine Art of Reblogitation and Going Ape for Miss USA
Posted by Vince LiCata on June 23, 2011 Reblogitation (pronounced with a “j” sound for the “g”, of course): the blogospheric phenomenon of reposting, and re-reposting, and re-re-reposting the information from the “apparent first” or “most snarky” report (or blog post) about a news item. Mother-post: the “apparent first” or “most snarky” report of an item, that then provides “the facts” for most…
Is “On Bullshit” actually bullshit? – or an attempt at “Inception”?
Posted by Vince LiCata on January 22, 2011 A physicist friend of mine recently lent me a copy of Harry Frankfurt’s “On Bullshit“, which purports to be the only ever philosophical analysis of “bullshit”. This former essay turned teeny tiny hardback book reaches such profound conclusions as: 1) bullshit is sort of like humbug, only more excremental; 2) bullshit is worse than lying,…
Heat Capacity 101: Detecting and Measuring Heat Capacity Changes in Biological Reactions
Posted by Vince LiCata on January 10, 2011 Okay, after a long, long gap (on the blogosphere timescale) and/or almost zero elapsed time (by scientific literature standards), we’re going to attempt to wrap up this mini-series on heat capacity effects in biology. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here, respectively. So: How do you know if your reaction has a heat capacity…
Parallel Universes? Arsenic and Phosphate – The Blogosphere, the Traditional Media, and the Scientific Literature
Posted by Vince LiCata on December 21, 2010 I’ve been strangely fascinated by the “arsenic-eating” and maybe “arsenic-utilizing’ bacteria report from NASA researchers and the so-called “backlash” (“arsenic-gate”) in the blogosphere. Many others have posted on this topic. What I’ve found most interesting is that there seem to be several parallel and barely intersecting universes: 1) the scientific literature, 2) the traditional media,…
The kids and I make a cardboard pinball machine (or duct tape is AWESOME!)
Posted by David Ng on November 4, 2010 Although I can’t remember where I saw “play with duct tape” on the list of learning objectives, I figured it would be cool to make a paper pinball machine with the kids – it’s kind of “educational.” (right?). Anyway, this ended up being a lot of fun, and (if I do say so myself) our…
Crickets chirping and Collider Whales
Posted by David Ng on November 2, 2010 Sorry it’s been a bit quiet here lately. Things have been busy at the museum, and I’ve also been writing in other places. In particular, These days I’m a guest blogger at Boing Boing, and on top of that, I’m also having fun starting a children’s novel. This novel has a mouthful of a title,…