Zoonomian

The Perfect Mathematician

Think I’ve stumbled upon what is fundamentally wrong with UK STEM policy, at least for the Maths bit. We’re not raising mathematicians correctly. In ‘The First Men in the Moon‘, H.G. Wells shares with us how the Selenite moon people got it right – over a century ago: “If, for example, a Selenite is destined to be [...]

The Amazing Disintegrating Screwdriver

Gee, I spoil you guys: a blog about a broken screwdriver. Not just any old screwdriver though, because the handle of this one is made from nitrocellulose, and they don’t do that anymore – not since the 1940s. I found the remains in a garage I’ve been clearing out over the past couple of days. Nitrocellulose is [...]

Unweaving the Rainbow

I took this short sequence in the garden this afternoon. No photo-shopping, just a nice illustration of the splitting of sunlight into it’s component colors by refraction through a water drop – shuddering in the breeze after a storm. The simplest of things, it put me in mind of John Keats’s supposed lament that Isaac [...]

The Open Ground – Biodiversity, Science & the Imagination (Podcast of conference proceedings)

Colleague and fellow science communicator Emma Quilligan at the time wrote up the conference at Nature Network. Now, browsing my archives, I’ve rediscovered the audio I made with Conservation Today as a record of the event, but which we never published. Now for the first time, and with organiser Will Pearse’s endorsement, here are the [...]

Iron before the Iron Age

Just a short note to share with you one of the many wonders I stumbled upon at the British Museum yesterday. This is an Inuit Lance Head, displayed in the Enlightenment Gallery (in the King’s Library). It was collected in Greenland in 1811 by John Ross while searching for the North West Passage. What’s significant about [...]

How would you ‘Break the Eerie Silence’ ?

Update 13th March – Competition results. For those of you checking back for the 12th March winning messages, they don’t seem to have appeared yet. Another eerie silence if you like. Watch this space. It’s been a spacey couple of weeks here at Zoonomian. What with the Royal Society’s meeting on astrobiology and the search [...]

Buck Rogers – A Copper Clad Lesson from History

In a piece for the Washington Post this week, movie director James Cameron gave his analysis of the NASA budget, and reminded us of the inspirational importance of space exploration; with the reciprocal suggestion that, when it comes to winning popular support for space, “rockets really do run on dreams”. The inspirational power of space [...]

Astrobiology Rap

As promised, here is science communicator Jonathan Chase’s impromptu Astrobiology Rap performed at last week’s Royal Society discussion meeting on ‘The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society‘. (Write-up of the event is here). Press the arrow key to stream live, or use the ‘download’ button to save the [...]

Extra-terrestrials Invade Royal Society

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have a grave announcement to make. Incredible as it may seem, both the observations of science and the evidence of our eyes lead to the inescapable assumption that those strange beings who landed in the Jersey farmlands tonight are the vanguard [...]

Science? – In Your Dreams

I’ve just discovered the University of California Santa Cruz’s website Dreambank.net; a fascinating repository of dreams that’s also a research tool. Developed by Adam Schneider and William Domhoff in the Psychology Department, the tool’s content of over 25,000 dream reports is drawn from a variety of sources and studies, capturing the memories of individuals aged from 7 [...]