Spectacle
milhayser | March 15, 2010Forget the chase, let's cut to the filling.
Inspired by Harold and Maude, Matthew Rowley searched high and low for a Ginger Pie recipe before putting one together himself. Like the film, this custardy creation brings together young ginger and aged rum, but unlike the film, nobody has to die.
If you already had pie for dinner, go ahead and have this savory Chicken, Leek, and Mushroom Cobbler for dessert. The recipe calls for dry cider and dry sherry, and while cooking turns all that fun into flavor, we won't tell if you sample the ingredients.
Shelley mixes things up with the Haw Berry…
milhayser | December 1, 2009
Listen up, procrastinators—Coturnix reminds us on A Blog Around the Clock that we only have until the stroke of midnight to submit the best blog entries of the year to OpenLab 2009. He writes "we are looking for original poems, art, cartoons and comics" as well as essays. You can see which posts have already been nominated, and order previous years' editions. So start scrounging the archives! And while you're at it, head over to Effect Measure to learn about the inner workings of viruses from Revere. You can compare photomicrographs of the swine flu virus with highly detailed, colorful…
amillikan | March 9, 2009In an opinion piece published in the Huffington Post Wednesday, a woman dying of leukemia vehemently spoke out against animal testing in medicine, positing that scientists might have found a cure for her condition by now if "they weren't sidetracked by misleading animal tests." While acknowledging the unfortunate nature of the woman's situation, ScienceBloggers are criticizing her stance that animal trials are not beneficial or are somehow to blame for the woman's sickness, asserting the necessity of using animal models for drug research and reinforcing that researchers must proceed in ways…
amillikan | December 31, 2008Aspiring scientists who have been conducting experiments form home labs have been encountering opposition. One DIY chemist was arrested for having a lab under the premise that it could be used to make bombs or drugs. Some biotech watchdogs fear that doing science outside of a lab may lead to biological hazards. "Actually the more likely negative scenario is that these DIY labs will produce absolutely nothing," said ScienceBlogger Jake Young from Pure Pedantry.
amillikan | December 29, 2008I came across this video floating in the ScienceBlogs back channels and decided it is way too cool to not post. Try watching this without feeling some kind of deep-seated nationalistic impulse stir within you. I never was much of a sporto, but I think this must be what frat boys feel when they watch football.
I won't say which team I was rooting for, but did you see the way that Mac ran away in fear and had to go get it's friends? Herein lies the Mac user bond that stems from a brand allegiance I will never understand. It's a good thing the video ended with ambiguity, before the Windows Vista…
amillikan | December 23, 2008The advent of the science blogger is changing the way people talk about science. But along with new modes of communication and new rhetoric come new questions and opinions about how this evolution is affecting the scientific process. ScienceBlogger Coturnix from A Blog Around the Clock posted his views about why both scientists and science journalists sometimes rant about science bloggers, and why this is a good thing.
amillikan | December 19, 2008When doctors opened the skull of a 3-day old from Colorado Springs to remove what they thought was a brain tumor, they were surprised to find a collection of organized body parts—including two small feet, a partial hand and intestines. "This was the most well-organized 'tumor' I've ever heard of," said ScienceBlogger PZ Myers, who discusses similar cases of developmental abnormalities on his blog, Pharyngula.
amillikan | December 1, 2008Video footage of a rare "elbowed" squid taken remotely from a Shell Oil Company drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico went viral this weekend. The squid is of the genus Magnapinna, has tentacles over 20 feet long, and is one of only a handful of its kind to have ever been observed by humans. It has been described as The footage may have been available for a year or longer, but only recently gained massive viewership when it was featured by National Geographic Nov 24.
vhughes | October 20, 2008As you've undoubtedly noticed by now, we've reached more than 1,000,000 comments on our network! W00t!
To celebrate, from September 14-29, our bloggers are setting up parties all over the U.S. and abroad. Click on the map below to see if there's a party near you.
Below the fold is the complete list of where the parties are happening, arranged by date. Check back often for links to party photos and film footage! (**Last update: 10/20**)
Tuesday, September 16:
Join Abbie Smith in Oklahoma City, OK. (See Abbie's photos!)
Wednesday, September 17:
Tim Lambert and Dan MacArthur in Sydney,…
vhughes | September 16, 2008Well, we've done it. Just over one year has passed since we hit 500,000 comments, and now, September 16, 2008, at 8:32 a.m. Eastern Time, we've reached 1,000,000. Hooray!
Check out the ScienceBlogs homepage throughout the day; we'll be rotating some of what we thought were the best of the million.
If you're near a major city (or even a not-so-major city), you may be able to check out of the 15 reader parties that various ScienceBloggers are throwing throughout the world. See the line-up here.
If you leave a comment before September 30, don't forget to enter in the ScienceBlogs comment…
vhughes | July 18, 2008I'm blogging live from a very hot Austin, Texas, at the Netroots Nation conference!
Officially, Netroots Nation (formerly YearlyKos) "amplifies progressive voices by providing an online and in-person campus for exchanging ideas and learning how to be more effective in using technology to influence the public debate."
They're certainly right about that free exchange of ideas—I've eaten free pastries from an Oregonian who's running for Senate (thanks, Jeff Merkley!), chatted with a physicist who used to work with Carl Sagan (and yes, the legendary astronomer was apparently just as charismatic…
ksharpe | August 30, 2007"The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds," says artist Theo Jansen. For over 14 years, Jansen has been engaged in the production of animari, or beach animals—massive kinetic sculptures constructed of light materials. After a firm push to begin, the wind takes over, and the skeletally beautiful 'animals' walk unaided over the beaches of the Netherlands, where Jansen lives and works.
The next video presents a computer simulation of Jansen's 'mechanism,' set to music by Philip Glass. After the jump, a 20-second spot of "Animaris Rhinocerous Transport" in motion.
ksharpe | May 15, 2007Ah, science fairs.
To the left, observe my colleague, fellow Seed-ster Lee Billings, feeling the science fair glow at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The Intel ISEF is the world's largest and most acclaimed gathering of pre-college-age scientists. Held each May, the fair brings together 1,500 students from over 40 nations to present their research, meet one another, and compete for prizes including a $50,000 college scholarship. As PZ Myers notes at Pharyngula, "when I was growing up, this was better known as the Westinghouse science fair, and…
sarahdasher | April 19, 2007Lloyd Godson, a 29-year-old Australian marine biologist, spent the last 13 days submerged in his local wetlands in a home-grown submarine. He was fulfilling a long-time dream.
His submersible, a 9-cubic-meter metal box, was an experiment in self-sufficiency. Air, water, and electricity were all generated or recycled on board during his stay: he provided electricity by riding a bicycle connected to a turbine, and maintained his air supply with a coil of algae that Godson watered with his urine. The whole space was only slightly larger than the space required by the Geneva Convention to hold…
ksharpe | April 17, 2007Today, New York City is wringing itself out after a late-season Nor'easter. Saturday, it dealt with another kind of flood. On April 14, a "Sea of People" dressed in blue and bearing boats, beach balls, and other watery accoutrements descended on lower Manhattan. They gathered in Battery Park at noon to hear brief speeches by community groups and leaders, and then fanned out along Church Street to the West and Pearl Street to the East, physically demarcating what would be Manhattan's new shoreline if sea levels were to rise by ten feet—a possible reality within the next hundred years according…
ksharpe | March 8, 2007When weird-science group the Athanasius Kircher Society held its inaugural meeting in New York City this January, the meeting's flaming grand finale was a live onstage performance by a 20-foot-long Rube Goldberg contraption.
The device's designer, Jesse Ferguson, has posted a video of the machine in action in his Seattle apartment, just before it was dismantled to be shipped across the country for its star turn at the AKS. The video is here, and with flames galore and a real, live laser, it's guaranteed to titillate your inner pyro.