The Asphalt Jungle. Really. Ananova runs on the “new kind of volcano” as the selling point here, whilst a small bit of cinematic history would have given them my much better title. Underwater volcanos off of Mexico which spit out asphalt […]

It’s rare that a book review makes me this incensed, but Dick Teresi’s smug throwdown of the new tome “Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids” in the New York Times Book Review this week did just that. While the book i[…]

As a former maths teacher (briefly), you can imagine how impressed I am with this woman’s teaching. (Brought to my attention by Anthony Easton.)[…]

Blogpulse promises much but I’m not sure how well it delivers. “The one-click answer to the question ‘What’s the buzz?’” says Blogpulse’s trends page. I am not sure that a blog aggregator is needed to tell you that[…]

Mendel’s Dwarf: Part Two of Two
So away from literary concerns, how is the science in Mendel’s Dwarf? Well don’t ask me, I gave up Biology aged thirteen because the experiments were not as good as Chemistry and Physics and it was a […]

Landspeed record broken
For data. Sorry. This was way below my “level” on slashdot (how does that level thing work?), so it’s a bit out of date – it happened last month if you look at the history of this competition.
Californi[…]

Language and the brain
There are a bunch of conditions that affect how the brain handles language. The ones that are reasonably well understood relate to damage to specific parts of the brain or are genetic in origin, but there are others where we do[…]

Now With Added Stats
Cosmetic Ads on TV are perennial science-blog fodder*, but I have noticed something new on the ads on (British) television. Statistics. Not simply “10 times smoother” but things like “10 times smoother, 15 women[…]

Nobody was expecting hard science from the BBC’s Test Your Pet, but even so it left pet owners shortchanged in its attempts to define animal intelligence as ‘doing cool tricks’. This is all very well if you have a dog, otherwise it&[…]

Today’s Office Debate – where did the word “OK” come from? Pausing only to lament the way in which promising office conversations can be ruthlessly squished by Google, we discover two conflicting origin tales – the more […]