35.99920 years in science communication
Over on Digg, there’s news that the organ in the brain responsible for female sexual response has been found. As one might expect, there are lots of sexist comments posting very early and at an alarming rate from the members: Female Libido
The actual news item in question can be found here, written by my good friend at New Scientist, Andy Coghlan.
The European Union has been messing with the organs in churches across the land. It wanted to extract all the lead from these instruments, but vergers, vicars and other clergymen starting with a “V” thought the EU wasn’t just extracting the Pb it was taking the P.
The UK’s Department of Trade & Industry (DTI) announced today that Pipe organs are outside the scope of an incoming EU Directive which restricts the use of hazardous substances including lead in machinery and appliances with an electrical component. DTI Minister Malcolm Wicks said today that the so-called RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) Directive
which will come into force on July 1 this year, was a serious cause for concern
among pipe organ builders because these historic instruments often contain
a small electric fan to give the lead pipes a good blow rather than relying on the organist pumping them up as was traditionally the case.
Is that enough blatant innuendo for one day, if not you can stick it in your pipe and smoke it!
Reuters is reporting that general practitioner Steve Hajioff warns that the UK’s preparations for a bird flu pandemic are inadequate.
The UK is on high alert for bird flu following the dead swan incident in Scotland and is stockpiling vaccine. Hajioff, however, suggests that the impact on infrastructure of an avian influenza epidemic would be like a thousand 9/11’s. “In the present day, you are talking about five million people across Europe and hundreds of thousands in the UK. It’s like 1,000 September 11ths all at once,” he said.
The insensitivity of such a phrase aside, Hajioff went on to tell BBC radio: “I’m a GP and I can prepare my surgery, but if the electricity company that supplies my power has not prepared, then I am not going to be able to treat patients.”
What worries me, is whether or not Dr Hajioff is qualified to offer a new thread to the scare-mongering surrounding bird flu in this way. Maybe he is. His website tells us he “is a broadcaster, a healthcare informatics consultant, a public health physician, and a writer.” It goes on to say that he has a particular interest in international health systems, communicable disease control and electronic data security.” Interestingly(?), “For fun, he paints, skis, cooks and drives his MG. He is also a keen MIDI musician.”
And, seeing as the reporting on his offering to BBC Radio suggests he didn’t actually tell the audience anything that isn’t fairly obvious then perhaps he is qualified after all.
Just for the record, despite the continued scaremongering for almost every H5N1 is yet to mutate into a human transmissable form and the evidence points to the likelihood that such a mutant would have less virulence among humans than H5N1 has among birds.
We’ll see.
Regular readers may have noticed I’m in a list-making mood these last few days, with the NMR acronyms feature and “what scientists are known for” posts…well over on The Island of Doubt, fellow science writer James Hrynyshyn is discussing the issue of the scientific ethic in rock and mentions the likes of Talking Heads, Rush, and Thomas Dolby as being hot on science.
Well, it got me thinking about actual artist names that betray a hint of the technophile or the science-minded among the muso crowd, so here’s a short list…in no particular order:
Chemical Brothers (chem)
We are Scientists (gen)
Cure (med)
EMF (tech)
X-ray Spex (tech)
AC/DC (tech)
Spock’s Beard (sci-fi)
Bio-Com (bio)
Medicine Head (med)
Television (tech)
10cc (bio)
UFO (sci-fi)
TLC (chem)
Atomic Kitten (phys/bio)
Atomic Rooster (phys/bio)
Transister (tech)
Quantum Jump (phys)
William Orbit (astro)
Oxide and Neutrino (chem/phys)
Suzanne Vega (astro)
Quake (geo)
Tenth Planet (astro)
Mercury Rev (chem/astro)
Electronic (tech)
Quartz (geo)
Electric Light Orchestra (tech)
Neil Diamond (geo)
Multi Purpose Chemical (chem)
The Dead Science (formerly The Sweet Science) (gen)
Electric Soft Parade (tech)
Death Comet Crew (astro)
Nuclear Rabbit (phys)
Electric Prunes (tech)
The Mars Volta (astro)
Radiohead (tech)
Van Der Graaf Generator (tech)
My Chemical Romance (chem)
Chemical People (chem)
Electric Six (tech)
Mind Science of the Mind (gen)
Flux Information Sciences (info)
Skin (derma)
Scientist (gen)
Eat Static (tech)
Echo and the Bunnymen (audio)
Who says chemists don’t have a sense of humour, if you haven’t already seen Paul May’s Silly Molecules site check that out right now, but in the meantime some genuine acronyms from the world of spectroscopy
Insensitive Nuclei Enhanced by Polarization Transfer (INEPT)
Combined Rotation And Multiple Pulse Spectroscopy (CRAMPS)
HOmonucleaR ROtary Resonance (HORROR)
Nuclear Overhauser Effect SpectroscopY (NOESY)
COrrelation SpectroscopY (COSY)
Slice Interleaved Depth Resolved Surface Coil Spectroscopy (SLITDRESS)
Proton Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy (P…you got it), which is often hyphenated with the next technique in the style of separations scientists who couple HPLC with ESI/MS and LC with DAD. Do I have to spell it out? We’d have P-V or V-P for that matter, depending on which technique came first.
Variably Adjusted Gamma Inhibiting Nuclear Association Spectroscopy (Okay, I made that one up, but I’m sure a spectroscopists somewhere is working on something similar), Hyphenated 2D versions of either this or the previous proton technique would be P-P and V-V.
There are many others including, CYCLOPS, HOHAHA, ROESY, SECSY, PASADENA, EXORCYCLE, DANTE, TOSS, INADEQUATE, ENDOR, FOCSY, HERPECS, DEPT, feel free to use the acronym search tool to validate the more suspect ones if you don’t trust me. Enter the acronym or abbreviation of interest in the yellow box on the right of that page and hit the GO button next to the phrase “Science Acronyms”.
Has anyone tried this new Coca Cola Blonde? Maybe it’s only available in the UK at the moment. Very refreshing on a balmy English summer afternoon…I suspect the recipe will be just as closely guarded as that of the Real Thing, but I reckon there’s a smidgeon or two of Zingiber officinale in this brew.
This has to be the biggest of small web pages. It’s scalled so that one electron in a hydrogen atom is a single pixel on your computer screen and the proton is 1000 pixels across. Try scrolling across one page at a time to see just how far that electron is from the proton. It will take you quite some time, to say the least as there’s a gap of 11 miles between them!
Hydrogen Atom Scale Model.
Whatever you don, just don’t try to print the page.
Anyone who has seen the San Andreas fault will be familiar with that section of fencing where the farmer hammered in the posts, put up the slats and then moved 20 feet sideways to do the next section.
Or, maybe it was an earthquake that moved the fence posts. Yes, that’s it. So when is the next big fence moving going to happen? Seismologists really don’t know. There has been no major earthquake on the southern section of the fault, running to the east of Los Angeles, during the recorded history of European settlement in western California (the past 250 years).
How much longer can the strain on this part of the fault build up without rupturing?
In this week’s Nature, Yuri Fialko of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA, attempts to answer that question with the help of data on the fault movements collected between 1985 and 2005. These radar and position (for example, GPS) measurements show how much the two sides of the fault have been moving past one another – the so-called slip rate. The bigger the average slip rate along a fault line, the more stress might be expected to be building up on parts of the fault that remain locked together, where a sudden rupture and release of the accumulated strain will happen in an earthquake.
Estimating the chance of such quakes is complicated, because movement across the fault does not necessarily have to lead to a build-up of stress. The stress might be getting released gradually rather than accumulating for a catastrophic event, owing to small movements called creep on the fault. Or it might be relaxed by compensating movements on other geological faults that branch off from the San Andreas fault, such as the San Jacinto fault to the south. Fialko found that the slip rates and accumulated stresses on the southern part of the San Andreas fault are indeed substantial: creep is not helping the fault to relax. The resulting strain is divided roughly equally between this and the San Jacinto fault – so the latter is not taking up most of the stress. Fialko concludes that there is a real likelihood that the long-dormant southern San Andreas fault could undergo a big earthquake before very much longer.
Apparently, “most doctors” have not heard of the “new” killer big that left a nine-year old boy with lungs full of holes after a bad scrape to his knee. At least that’s according to an article in Time magazine. And it seems that readers of the Digg site too were at a loss to understand how this bug could have remained so anonymous. So, what is this mystery bug?
Well, it’s none other than MRSA, or methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus, sometimes labelled as multiple resistant, mentioned numerous times on this site and countless others. This nasty little microbe, as it’s name would suggest is a strain of S aureus that has evolved resistance to methicillin, and various other antibiotics. It’s well known in the UK, Japan and elsewhere. It’s certainly been the subject of multiply repugnant media scare stories about killer hospitals in the UK for the last couple of years at the very least. Indeed, its existence has prompted the UK government in its usual kneejerk response to media scare stories to have the whole of the National Health Service re-organised so that everyone has to use an antiseptic gel, wet wipe or whatever every single time they enter a ward, exit a ward, breathe in, breathe out…….
The variation on theme cited by Time, however, adds another couple of capitals to that acronym C and A for community acquired MRSA. This bug has hit the streets in other words.
The street-wise MRSA is not such a tough cookie as its hospital-dwelling cousin. It does respond to antibiotics, but it does spread much more easily among otherwise healthy people, says Time, and could, under pressure, evolve significant resistance. The strain that nine-year old picked up from a knee scrape spread through his body very rapidly indeed. But, his is not an isolated case. Never mind H5N1 and SARS, it’s MRSA you have to watch.
Inspired by orcmagazine.com’s racial profiling site Google
your race) in which they list the results entirely out of context of searching Google
with the phrases "white people are known for", "black people are known for",
"Hispanics are known for" etc etc, we thought we’d give it a try with the phrase
"Scientists are known for". Some interesting results emerged, all of them
totally out of context and not necessarily meaning what you think they mean, but
interesting in some strange way nevertheless.
Scientists are known for…
Later, we’ll Google another job to find out what Google really thinks of you…