Iāve spent most of this week writing about science for kids. So for a change of pace, today weāre 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 risquĆ©. 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. Ā Often while fixing the high tech ones. While the Maguyveresque electronics shop manager at my grad school probably didnāt really use bubblegum and a paperclip to repair NMR […]
Scientific nomenclature can be a bit of a funny thing, as weāve discussed before. When you make something entirely new, it obviously needs a name. Today weāre talking about the strange situation of silanones, where the most obvious name was already taken by something that is not accurately described by the name. Silicone Since silicon […]
Animals, of course, play a big role in many scientistsā 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 […]
Itās fairly common for a superheroās origin story to involve some sort of lab accident. Bruce Banner’s gamma rays and Peter Parker’s radioactive spider being particularly famous examples. And of course, āunstable moleculesā almost seemed to be Marvelās go-to for a while during the Silver Age. And yet there aren’t a lot of stories about […]
Impact factors are an increasingly controversial measure in the scientific literature. The general principle is simple enough. The impact factor of a journal is the number of times papers in that journal from the past two years are cited divided by the number of citable papers published over that time. A general idea of how […]
There has been some amused talk of prescribing sildenafil (famously known as Viagra, much less famously as Revatio) for pulmonary hypertension. How strange it is that doctors are now prescribing an erectile dysfunction drug for potentially life threatening conditions. The logic behind the alternative uses is sound enough: they all deal with regulating blood flow […]
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 […]
Today, we are talking about the most beautiful footnote I have ever read. Or at least the best footnote I have ever read in a scientific paper, as the rest of us cannot hope to aspire to the footnote talents of Sir Terry Pratchett. Whether they will admit it or not, every scientist has at […]
Perhaps it was inevitable that I would end up writing a blog about the silly side of science. After all, I did write my thesis on NMR spectroscopy. And as I am about to show you, NMR people can get very, very silly when they’re coming up with acronyms for their pulse sequences. The following […]