Scientific journals tend to have very strict formatting. There is an expected structure. There are templates. If an author tries to deviate, it’ll probably get changed back to tradition somewhere in the editorial process. Not to mention it’ll annoy the reviewers and you really don’t want to do with that. But every now and then […]
Today we’re taking a look at some good old fashioned mad science. While there are actually serious research questions being examined in these studies, it doesn’t change the fact that there have been multiple studies where scientists went out and created glow in the dark animals. Green Fluorescent Protein IN 2008, Green Fluorescent Protein was […]
We’re going into a new year, and of course that means it’s time for New Years resolutions. They’ve never really been my thing, but I am going to try to get back to writing more regularly. But I am going to take a moment to suggest some New Years resolutions for scientists. Which I promise […]
Victor Hugo is best known for his novels Les MIserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though it’s probably more accurate to say that he is best known for going off on extremely long tangents in said novels. Such as the infamous twenty six pages about the Paris sewer system. Though really, the eighteen chapters […]
The planets that were known in ancient times were, naturally enough, named after the Roman gods. When more advanced instruments let us discover even more planets, it only made sense to continue that theme. But the choice of the god of the sky has led to some irresistible jokes. So today we’re looking at some […]
After vanishing for a bit into the world of working strange hours and taking classes, I am back with a discussion of discoveries hiding in plain sight. That almost seems topical! There have been plenty of scientific discoveries that occurred, essentially, because someone decided to actually look. So let’s look at some recent and not […]
One of the reasons I started this blog was to show the lighter side of science. Usually, this means the silly side. But since Valentine’s Day is on Wednesday, today we’re looking at the romantic side. And I probably won’t even make more than one “great chemistry” joke, which is more than we can say […]
In my early days of grad school, I was going to look at the mechanism of reactions with silicon and gemanium triple bonds. Of course, it eventually became clear that my chemistry talents lay in spectroscopy, computational, data analysis and actually writing the paper and not at all in the actual synthesis. But in the […]
When you look at a list of animals by their common names, it will generally start with aardvark and ends with zebra (or zorse…). But when it comes to scientific names, the extremes of the alphabet get a little more extreme. And at least in a few cases, their positioning in alphabetical list is quite […]
Particle physics is not a subject that seems like it would be associated with the word “whimsy”. It’s basically the go to stereotype for srs bsns scientist. We’ve seen that astronomers can be very literal in their naming. But then there is the amazing whimsical world of naming quarks. A world which has nothing to […]