The week in six bits: 1. What would it feel like to touch a human brain? We’re always told it’s jelly-like and yet, when I held it in my undergrad gross anatomy class, it felt like a cold cooked chicken (it was even wrapped in tin foil, I recall). Well, […]
Newspapers & Magazines
A long and tedious blog post about scientific publishing
The world of scientific publishing continues to excite. Long-standing readers will recall that I have addressed this topic before. My remarks have even been quoted by The Guardian, no less (well, by The Guardian’s website at any rate). To recap, the controversies here revolve around the funding model used to […]
Knowing me, knowing you (Eureka!)
If there is “more than one way of knowing”, then how can you know that that is true? Presumably, if you know that it is true, then I can simply ‘know’ that it is not true. And I can further simply choose to ‘know’ that I am right in a […]
Sex + Everlasting life = Science!
Hopefully I will get a few more hits on here now that I have posted something with ‘Sex’ in the title. But you’ll have to consider this one a quickie. The British newspaper lifestyle pages (Telegraph, Daily Mail, Daily Star, etc) are running a story fed to them via press […]
New research reveals same findings as old research
“New Study Debunks Prior Belief” is a pretty common format for science news headlines, especially in any area of science that deals with how human beings behave, what they believe, and what values are important to them (psychology, in other words). Very often, however, these alleged debunkings are themselves open […]
How to predict the future
Well done Ali Razeghi, who’s only just gone and invented a time machine. And what a time machine it is. Despite the near wall-to-wall use of Back to the Future imagery in news coverage, this is not a time travelling machine which transports you physically into the future. No, according to […]