SciencePunk

Vampire Forensics by Mark Jenkins

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:13:04 -0800

After a brief insurrection by their blue collar offspring, zombies, vampires have once more regained their prominence as the monster supreme, leaping out at us from every bookshelf, cinema screen and TV set. What better time then for Mark Jenkins to unleash his accomplished study of the bloodsucker legend, Vampire Forensics.

Published through National Geographic Books and accompanied by a television documentary, Vampire Forensics delves into the long history of the vampire, one which began millennia before a certain Bram Stoker set pen to parchment. Drawing upon the latest research in anthropology, archaeology, folklore and history, Jenkins dusts away centuries of revisionism and misconception to reveal the true origins of the myth.

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Record grooves as seen under the microscope

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:52:34 -0800

Thanks to Emilia for showing me this awesome post on the Synthgear website which shows what record grooves look like under an electron microscope. Here's a line of disco magnified 500 times:

Researcher Chris Supranowitz at the University of Rochester's The Insitute of Optics took the images, one assumes for his own nerdy amusement.
Be sure to check out the full set, which includes an image in eye-popping 3D!

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Illustrious, illustrated, female astronauts

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:57:14 -0800

Graphic artist Philip Bond drew this awesome set of female astronauts.

You can see the whole collection on his Flickr page.

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Royal Mail celebrates 350 years of the Royal Society

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 22:55:58 -0800

A set of special commemorative stamps is being launched today to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. The stamps feature ten of the most prominent historical fellows, as chosen by leading figures in the society today.

How many can you name? Answers below the fold!

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Mysterious photos found in old camera

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 02:11:22 -0800

For my birthday I was given a vintage Super Baldina camera. A German model first manufactured in 1938, it has a coupled rangefinder and pop-out lens. At the time it cost an impressive $58 dollars, around $900 in today's money. Wow! It's very pretty.

My flatmate picked it up in an antiques store for £25. That's about £25 in today's money. When I opened it to put in some film, however, I discovered a secret surprise! There was a roll of film already in the camera! Winding it up, I realised that near enough the whole film had been exposed. What could possibly be on there?

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Beautiful colorimeter lets you take snapshots of smells

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 03:23:53 -0800

Researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have developed a way to compare aromas visually using specially developed inks.

Kenneth Suslick and his colleagues used tiny squares of polymer film that hold 36 drops of carefully designed dyes. These pigments change colour when exposed to various chemicals. The result is a cheap system for detecting very low concentrations of gaseous compounds. The cards can be used like a physicist's radiation dose badge to alert lab workers when they have been exposed to toxic gases.

As shown above, the cards can be used to give each particular compound a unique fingerprint. This means that the system can also be used to detect subtle differences in complex aromas, such as coffee.

Suslick's seventeen-year-old son Benjamin carried out the research into coffee aromas, showing how the colorimeters could be used as a quick and reliable way to detect burned or spoiled batches in the food industry.

I'd love to know what other smells looked like. A giant wall poster showing a colour map of Chanel No 5 or jasmine would make a great talking point, and look gorgeous too.

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The Circle of Leaf

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 18:58:21 -0800

Flickr user robherr created this fantastic image, summing up life, death, beauty, youth, age and decay in a handful of leaves.

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Real life dragon discovered

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 21:45:56 -0800

Neatorama reports the discovery of a real life (albeit tiny) dragon!

While participating in a herpetology study we stumbled across this female laying eggs in a nest. She was found in the Lambusango Forest reserve and was immediately released after this photograph was taken.

Neatorama notes it could be related to Draco volans. No word yet on whether it breathes fire, hoards gold, or kidnaps fair maidens.

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Geek love on Valentines

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 22:21:07 -0800

Valentines is a time to pronounce your undying love to the geek in your life, and what better way than through the medium of maths and science?

A true geek knows that Texas Instruments says more than Hallmark ever could. Plotting a heart is a great trick if you're not good with words, or would rather let that special someone connect the dots. The Wolfram Alpha team have the formula for love right here.

If you'd prefer to express your feelings in three dimensions, Matt Parker reveals how to make a Möbius strip Valentines Card. Weird fact: It can't be cut into two halves - a delightful expression of the indivisible nature of your relationship.

If you're still a novice in the game of love, then fear not. This handy 1960s Japenese love guide has step-by-step instructions covering everything from mild snuggling to heavy petting. Just follow the arrows:

It might surprise you to learn that the Valentines focus on love and romance is mostly an obsession of the English speaking world - the day is used more generally to celebrate friendship in many other countries. How better then to sum up your feelings to your boss on Valentine's Day than with an "incredible edible chocolate anus", playfully reminding them exactly where they can press their lips to this year.

That's all from me - if you know of any more geek love fun then post your links below!

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Man shrugs off 500,000 volts of electricity

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:31:24 -0800

Looking every bit like the mythical Silver Power Ranger, the guy in this video is bestowed with similarly impressive powers - the ability to shoot lightning from his hands!

So what's really happening here? The lightning is actually being generated by the huge Tesla coil in the background, and flowing through the figure into a ground point near the camera. The chain mail suit protects the guy as the electricity flows around him rather than through him.

The video was shot in Austin, Texas, as part of a documentary for German television. Producer Johannes Wiebus says:

A guy in a chain mail Faraday suite is getting hit with 500.000 volts, generated by a home made Tesla Coil. Lightning sparks are shooting out of his hands, right over our camera's lens. We had mounted the camera in its own Faraday cage to protect it.

The video was made with Arc Attack, a Texan band that uses singing Tesla coils.

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Gummi Worm Chromosomes

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 03:19:01 -0800

Artist Kevin Van Aelt makes lots of biology-inspired art, including this delicious-looking chromosome chart made out of jelly worms. NOM NOM NOM!

Via Serious Eats

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Richard Younger-Ross MP supports the Campaign for Libel Reform

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 21:54:25 -0800

Some time back I wrote to my MP, Lib Dem Richard Younger-Ross, to ask why he hadn't signed up to Early Day Motion 423 for libel law reform. I'm please to say I've received a reply in a bundle of forwarded mail. The news in a nutshell: Richard Younger-Ross wholeheartedly supports the campaign for libel reform!

"As a nation we have found ourselves in the position where doctors who criticise heart implants and journalists who expose corporate cynicism are being sued in our courts for libel, rather than being congratulated for trying to save lives. This has to change. While individuals need a right to redress if their reputation is damaged, our laws need to give more protection to the right to free expression.

English libel laws barely recognise the invention of the printing press, let alone the internet, and our outdated laws have become a scourge not only here, but abroad too. We see it as an embarrassment that foreigners can be sued in our courts on the flimsiest of pretexts, and that this has led the United Nations Human Rights Committee to take the view that our laws discourage "critical media reporting on matters of serious public intewrest, adversely affecting the ability of scholars and journalists to publish their work", and that 'libel tourism' could "affect freedom of expression world-wide on matters of valid public interest

[...] I am pleased to inform you I have signed EDM 423, and that the Liberal Democrats will continue to support calls for a Libel Law Reform in Parliament, and will urge the other parties to follow our lead"

Kudos to Richard Younger-Ross and his brethren!

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Nifty gallery of spacemen

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 22:44:04 -0800

Thanks to Greg Foot for leading me to this delightful gallery of couture space fashion circa 1959 - present. I'd love to know more about the team behind each of these - did they employ seamstresses and tailors as well as materials scientists and flight suit technicians?

One of NASA's seven original astronauts, Gordon Cooper modelling the Mercury flight suit developed by B. F. Goodrich in 1959. I love how Cooper looks every inch the dashing hero - the pose, the athletic figure, the rich Kodachrome(?) colours. He lived out that image too - after a power failure onboard one spaceflight disabled the navigation instruments, Cooper used his knowledge of star patterns and chalk markings he made onto the capsule window to correctly gauge the timing and angle for his re-entry.

Famed lunar golfer Alan Shepard wearing the suit designed for the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, which he commanded. Contrasting the bravado seen in Cooper's picture, Shepard looks smaller and fragile. Instead of a man wearing a suit, we see an elaborate piece of equipment built to protect a precious cargo. An element of the biomechanical also creeps in, with numerous ports and tubes ferrying life-saving fluids to the demanding creature inside - hence the term "umbilical cables".

Finally, here are NASA's prototype suits, seen during a testing session in Moses Lake, Washington. The astronaut is no longer recognisable as human - the faceless hunched figures with cameras hanging from their necks look like strange alien tourists. Hidden inside, wrapped in a small piece of Earth's atmosphere taken with them, the spacemen are no longer visible as such at all. It's almost as if to get to alien worlds we need to give up a little bit of our humanity in the process. Let's hope we don't trade off too much.

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Weird symbols hidden under my TV

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:38:50 -0800

I discovered these symbols hidden underneath my TV. Does anyone know what they mean?

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Exam anger: What did you learn to hate at school?

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:19:42 -0800

Today I got a tip off from science comms lecturer Alice Bell about a growing revolt amongst biology students in response to what they believe is an unfair exam paper.

BBC News reports on a Facebook 'campaign' launched against yesterday's A level biology exam. Students are apparently unhappy about the question posed by the AQA paper, citing that few had any relevance to the material they'd studied. Something to do with shrews, apparently.

These complaints have predictably found little support amongst those of us who've been there and soldiered though years of science education. Specialisation is a luxury that is afforded you incrementally in science - you start by learning a huge range of ideas and gradually delve deeper into particular areas. One student was aggreived that the exam "gave questions which were not akin to the specimen papers provided". Well, heck, if you only bothered to learn what you thought would be in the exam, I'd say that you've probably missed the point of an education. Or perhaps like director of the JCQ, Dr Sinclair, you believe that science exams should be easy because everyone "deserves a positive experience of science".

Now, we could argue all day about the different aspects of the examination system, what it was supposed to measure, the purpose of education and future generations of scientists, but that would be BORING. Instead, I'd like to embrace the self-righteous outrage of these students and ask: what did school teach you to hate? Did Eco's Name of the Rose embue you withg a long-standing hatred for meandering Italian prose? Did Patrick Fullick's textbook compel you to call forth the hordes of Cthulhu to smite the world's physicists? Did truding after a plastic football in the freezing rain turn you off exercise for life? Tell me your stories!

Oh, and just be happy you're not sitting a GCSE science exam.

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Love is blind

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:50:33 -0800

So mosquitoes find a partner who can sing in perfect harmony

Sniffing out books in trouble

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 04:47:36 -0800

Measuring the smell of old books to find candidates for preservation

Self Healing Bio-concrete

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:54:50 -0800

That is all.

The Astronaut's Cookbook

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 02:43:28 -0800

Recipes from the space race

First film of a 'giant' stingray

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:08:33 -0800

Incredible & beautiful phantom of the ocean

Mice Levitated in Lab

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:36:03 -0700

Anti-gravity machine tackles mammals for the first time

Bad Designs

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 03:25:56 -0700

A catalogue of failure made before #fail even became a meme

13 more things that don't make sense

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:43:09 -0700

From the big bang to the big bloop

Pfizer fined $2.3bn

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:37:02 -0700

The joys of regulation

DIY cameraphone macro lens

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:07:21 -0700

Requires one old DVD player, zero tech savvy

Unfortunate paper title:

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:06:54 -0700

"Pediatric firearm injuries: time to target a growing population"

T. Rex "Mostly Ate Babies"

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:27:19 -0700

This dinosaur needs a PR agent, fast

Organic 'has no health benefits'

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:13:11 -0700

Food fad fading fast

Hamas: Israel Targets Gaza Youth With Aphrodisiac Gum

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:16:54 -0700

Outbreaks of frenzied mastication reported

Robo-bats with flexible metal muscles

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:49:25 -0700

Micro-UAVs are a blend of nature and sci-fi futurism