When a new species is discovered, there are a lot of options for naming it. As long as you don’t name it after yourself, you can basically do what you want. A significant physical characteristic. The place you discovered it. An important mentor. Or, well, we saw from fruit fly gene names that scientists are […]
I’ve spent most of this week writing about science for kids. So for a change of pace, today we’re looking at some naughty science acronyms. We are all very mature scientists who would never giggle upon realizing that the acronym is something a little risqué. Dirty jokes about Uranus are of course rather well known, […]
The popular image of science involves a lot of high tech tools. The reality is, much like any job, you end up using some utterly mundane things. Often while fixing the high tech ones. While the Maguyveresque electronics shop manager at my grad school probably didn’t really use bubblegum and a paperclip to repair NMR […]
Animals, of course, play a big role in many scientists’ lives. Sometimes they are research subjects. Sometimes they’re a source of inspiration. In my own work, large portions of my thesis were written with my laptop sitting delicately on top of my cat Schroedinger. At the other end of the spectrum, I frequently had to […]
Today we’re moving over to biology, because chemists definitely don’t have a monopoly on being silly. I’ve already shared some funny NMR terminology, so today the fruit fly geneticists get to have their turn. Fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster) are a very popular organism for genetic studies because you can get so many generations so quickly […]