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 […]
They say there are two gateway drugs to science: dinosaurs and space. So it’s no wonder the names for astronomy related projects tend to be quite… romantic. We named what we saw in the sky after old gods, and we kept that theme going when we travelled to them. Often space projects are named for […]
Usually, the abstract of a scientific paper is quite a wordy thing. Shorter than the paper itself by a considerable margin, but it still says a lot. It gives a general overview of what the paper is about and what techniques are used. But every now and then you see an abstract where the authors […]
The Ig Nobel prizes were announced last night. Which was hilariously good timing seeing as yesterday I idly wondered if they’d been announced yet for this year. Sadly I didn’t get to actually watch the webcast live due to choir practice, but all the same it’s basically a gift wrapped post for this blog. So […]
There are lots of reasons to undertake a scientific investigation. Sometimes it’s pure and simple curiosity. Sometimes it’s a directed effort to solve a specific problem. Often it’s pure curiosity that gets dressed up as a directed effort while writing a grant application. Sometimes it’s trying to solve one specific problem and accidentally solving another. […]
Star Trek has inspired countless scientist. The character of Wesley Crusher was essentially written for me: A young child watching Star Trek: The Next Generation because her father loved the original series. As a teenager, Kathryn Janeway was the first woman I saw on television who got as excited about science as I did. Sometimes […]
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 […]