nerd alert

wallpaper of the week 20-03-12: majestic moss

joseph — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:36:37 +0000

I’ve been a very bad nerd, not having posted a new wallpaper in over 2 months! I blame it on the impending doom that is my PhD thesis. Well, I snapped this pic of some moss on a water irrigation tube whilst on a stroll to clear the head. Mosses are small, relatively simple plants with no flowers, cones or fruit. They are also ‘non-vascular’ ie have no xylem or phloem and so need to get their moisture from the [read on...]

Too fussy for words?

jonathan — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:17:41 +0000

One of the great advantages of blogs is the opportunity they offer to react quickly to developments in science, the news, the courts, and so on. Considering I’m discussing the way a science paper was covered in the news three weeks ago, this blogpost misses that ideal of topicality by some distance – but I think it’s an interesting little example so I’m posting it anyway. A little while ago, the auditory cortex was in the news. For an auditory [read on...]

wallpaper of the week 16-01-12: mad mushrooms

joseph — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 18:36:09 +0000

While we’re on the job of self snapped shots, I took this little pic of mushies a couple of months back in Cardiff. Being a foreigner to these strange isles, I have no idea what sort these actually are. Needless to say I didn’t bother munching any. Mushrooms are the spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus. Fungi are a fantastically diverse bunch; they can taste yummy, make antibiotics, be hugely poisonous or even elicit some trippy psychedelia. One particular type [read on...]

Don’t be coy: full-frontal data nudity is sexier

blake — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:12:10 +0000

While standing outside a party the other night, basking in the eerie glow of a moon halo, a good friend of mine who has a penchant for skepticism of science turned to me and said, “You realize that science works on an honour system, right? If a scientist makes some stuff up, more often than not, no one’s ever going to find out.” Usually comments like this from him are my cue to stand up and be the champion to [read on...]

The Ronald McDonald Paradox

alisa — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:05:23 +0000

I fear I have turned into a naïve idealist. I’m concerned about the increasingly blurred line between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ actions of big corporations, and saddened that science lies at the heart of it. [A disclaimer: I am aware that there are a plethora of companies who strive for success strictly through ethical practices, and I am not anti-business]. An obvious example is the science of killing people. I might say I think we’re spending an insane amount of public [read on...]

wallpaper of the week 21-11-11: webs of steel

jonathan — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 01:30:00 +0000

This week’s pic is one I snapped on a highland holiday – she’s a native resident of Lochcarron, although you can find plenty of her fellow garden spiders in, you guessed it, gardens all over Europe and North America. She’s also known as a cross orbweaver, diadem spider or – to you and me - Araneus diadematus. Common they may be, but these ladies (the gents are smaller and don’t spin webs) are pretty impressive engineers. The first, anchoring thread [read on...]

Incredible timelapse views of Earth

joseph — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:22:14 +0000

These are time lapse sequences taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station during August and October. The combination of city lights, aurora and thunderstorms from space are simply mesmerizing. A super fun game is to try and guess the location of each sequence from the visible land masses. I’ll post them below the vid. For full trippyness you may want to click through to watch it in HD on the vimeo site. 1. Aurora Borealis Pass over the United [read on...]

wallpaper of the week 14-11-11: Antennae Galaxies

joseph — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 12:08:33 +0000

The Antennae Galaxies are a pair of distorted colliding galaxies about 70 million light years away in the constellation of the Crow. This picture combines observations made by the Hubble telescope in the visible spectrum (blue) with preliminary observations collected at submillimetre wavelengths (red and yellow) by only 12 of what will eventually be 66 of ALMA’s antennaes. Although the resolution of ALMA can’t yet compare to that offered by Hubble, it can do something Hubble can’t – detect the [read on...]

wallpaper of the week 31-10-11: four antennas

joseph — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 14:51:40 +0000

This beautiful photo by José Francisco Salgado shows four antennas of the Atacama Large Millimetre/submillimetre Array (ALMA) gazing up at the star-filled night sky. The Moon is visible to the right whilst the Milky Way can be seen stretching across the upper left. ALMA, consisting of 66 antennas, is being built at an altitude of 5000m way up on the Chajnantor plateau in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama desert is one of the driest spots on earth. This combined [read on...]

Throwing shapes for science

nicky — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:02:15 +0000

We’ve all suffered that terrifying moment during our research when we’ve been asked what it is we’re actually doing. There’s that slight awkward pause, the sucking-in of breath through the teeth, and then… we bust out the moves and interpretive dance our way to an explanation. Right? Well, maybe not. But that’s the premise of Gonzolabs‘ annual Dance Your PhD contest. The objective – as if it needs clarifying – is to get PhD students to translate their thesis into [read on...]