scientist
carlyo | May 16, 2013Heroes should never be forgotten, but unfortunately too many of them in the field of science go missing from our classroom textbooks. Equally disturbing is that a disproportionate number of these heroes overlooked are women and minorities.
While the average American young person will likely have no trouble detailing the latest antics of such stars as Ashton Kutcher, Lindsay Lohan, or Kanye & Kim, most, sadly, would be hard-pressed to tell you who the following trailblazers in science were:
-- Molecular biologist Rosiland Franklin, who was responsible for much of the research and discovery…
esiegel | October 26, 2012"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future." -Niels Bohr
What's going to happen next? It's perhaps the most important thing to know if we want to be prepared for practically anything in our lives. And without even thinking about it, most of us are actually very good at this in a huge number of aspects of our lives. For example...
Image credit: Crazy Adventures in Parenting.
I was hungry at work today, and I was prepared for it. Somehow, I knew that I was going to need food throughout the course of the day, and so I was prepared for it by bringing food from home. This…
tsmith | May 24, 2011This wasn't the post I wanted to write about the ASM conference. There's been lots of great science discussed (I've tried to tweet some of it, but the wifi in both the conference center and my hotel have been spotty, so I've not had a chance to write anything comprehensive). Instead, I'm ticked off and venting via dashed-off blog rant.
[Me, trying to make a purchase]: Do you have any of these in a box that doesn't say "from someone in New Orleans who loves you"? I was going to get them for my lab and that might be kind of creepy.
[Retail salesguy]: Your lab? I'm not sure those are good for…
grrlscientist | February 14, 2010tags: nerds, valentine's day, comedy, funny, humor, parody, offbeat, music video, education, streaming video
I did what this guy suggests and went one further: I married a nerd (but not on VD).
It's kinda hard being a nerd on Valentine's Day.
Cause Statistically ladies don't feel the same way.
So i say to all the girls,
From the nerds across the world.
Hug a nerd on Valentines Day.
Oh it only takes me one minute so solve a rubix cube.
But when it comes to the ladies I'm a really big noob.
So i say to all the girls,
from the nerds across the world.
Hug a nerd on Valentine's Day.
Spoken: YOU…
edyong | April 2, 2009In a laboratory at Aberystwyth University, Wales, a scientist called Adam is doing some experiments. He is trying to find the genes responsible for producing some important enzymes in yeast, and he is going about it in a very familiar way. Based on existing knowledge, Adam is coming up with new hypotheses and designing experiments to test them. He carries them out, records and evaluates the results, and comes up with new questions. All of this is part and parcel of a typical scientist's life but there is one important difference that sets Adam apart - he's a robot.
Adam is the brainchild of…
sciencewoman | February 19, 2009Dr. Ashanti Pyrtle is an assistant professor in the College of Marine Science at the University of South Florida. She's a chemical oceanographer who studies the fate, transport and retention of radionuclides in aquatic ecosystems. Her PhD work investigated the marine distribution of radioisotopes from the Chernobyl accident, and she's currently doing work in Puerto Rico, off the Florida coast, and in the Savannah River. She's one of the first female African-American chemical oceanographers, and the first African-American to earn an oceanography Ph.D. from Texas A&M University.
Dr. Pyrtle…
esiegel | May 20, 2008Some of you who've been following astronomy for awhile might remember this report, where a group of astronomers reported finding a giant "void" in the Universe.
What is a void? Well, galaxies are distributed pretty randomly, but because of gravity, they cluster together. A small example is our local group which looks like this,
and a larger example is the Virgo cluster, which is about 1,000 times as massive as our local group, and looks like this:
Well, a void is the opposite of a cluster, where you have a large volume of space that's simply empty of galaxies and matter. This press release…
esiegel | May 8, 2008Let's say we're having a nice day here on Earth; the Sun is shining, the clouds are sparse, and everything is just looking like a peach:
And then Lucas goes and tells me,
Oh my God, Ethan! It's Armageddon! An asteroid is coming straight for us! You've got to stop it!
Really? Me? Well, how would I do it? Let's say we've got some reasonably good asteroid tracking going on, and we've got about 2 months before the asteroid is actually going to hit us. We'd like to do something with the situation on the left, to avoid the situation on the right:
Well, what we really have to do is change the…
esiegel | May 7, 2008The American Association of Physics Teachers just published a study of 1,000 likely U.S. voters about science, religion, evolution, and creationism. The results are frightening. Here are some of the "highlights" of their study:
38% of Americans are in favor of the teaching of religion in public school science classrooms.
65% of Americans do not think that it is an important science goal to understand the origin and diversity of biological life on Earth.
47% of Americans believe that the earliest humans lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
21% of Americans do not believe that the…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2007I have been following this furor over Nobel laureate Jim Watson's comments about blacks, women and homosexuals and I am astonished that he would walk around, openly spouting such stupid and irrational prejudices when his beliefs are easily disproven scientifically! Has he read anything in the scientific literature that has been published since he won his Nobel in 1962? I would guess not, since he is woefully and inexcusably ignorant.
In view of his fresh onslaught of unabashed racism, sexism and homophobia (this isn't the first time he has openly blasted anyone who is not a priviledged white…