science

Some great ideas have been born in the pub — some really dumb ones too.

I shared this article on Twitter but it’s worth repeating. In the latest study, participants picked up wet or dry objects including marbles of different sizes with normal hands or with fingers wrinkled after soaking in warm water for 30 minutes. The subjects were faster at picking up wet marbles with wrinkled fingers than with dry ones, but wrinkles made no difference for moving dry objects.

Derek Lowe on this series about the mental consequences of graduate school in chemistry: I saw several examples of grad students who got trapped at some point in their work or their writing-up phase, and were having a lot of trouble actually moving on to something else. Staying where they were was causing them damage, but they seemed to feel even worse when they tried to do something about it.

The entire collection of OMNI Magazine is now available on the Internet Archive. Here’s the entire list in reverse chronological order. By way of David Wharton and Michael Tsai

This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with. This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.

A nice look at Ambras syndrome. The name Ambras comes from Petrus Gonzales, who at age 12 in 1556 was brought as a slave from Tenerife in the Canary Islands to the court in France. He had a strikingly hairy face, married young, and had 4 children, 3 of whom were born hairy. His daughter Tognina and son Arrigo passed on the trait. Royalty, who called Petrus the “man of the woods,” thought he represented a race of hairy people from the Canary Islands.

Well, damn. I missed the brightest moon of the year. There’s always next year, I guess.

Another great and thorough article from Ethan Siegel. Ethan gives a run down of density and gravity on his way to discussing how our current civilization will run out of helium. I still clearly remember my 10th grade chemistry teacher telling me about this in the 80’s. He was a retired geo-chemist and one of the singular motivations in my academic life.1 He was a genuinely caring, gentle and fun man in his 60’s.

Ethan Siegel wrote a readable and understandable status report on dark matter in the universe. Very enjoyable.

I know people are excited for the Mars Rover to find something amazing, but Derek Lowe thinks like I do. It’s highly likely that there’s something interesting out there, but let’s not get crazy. Statistics tell me that there is likely life external to the Earth. It also tells me it is not likely to be found on Mars. I’d be excited if it were, but also extremely surprised.