Mssv

During the England game yesterday we came up with an idea for a new reality show. There are already shows centred around pop stars, hospitals, pirates and all sorts, but what about scientists?
Introducing LAB: The Show. 12 graduate and postdoc students in biology are placed in a lab for ten weeks in order to produce [...]

An extremely noisy and irritating fire alarm is scraping across my eardrums here at the lab. We have quite a clever alarm system here, in that there are two types of alarms - the first one (which is what I am hearing right now) means ‘get ready, there might be a fire’ and the second [...]

An excerpt from a BBC News story about a new Russian missile:
“Colonel Baluyevsky gave few details of the new missile which was tested on Wednesday, but said it was one that moved five times the speed of light.”
Wow, that’s some seriously good engineering they’ve got over there in Russia. If I lived in the US, [...]

The feeling of total, horrified incredulity is not one that I get to enjoy very often, but this afternoon I had a stiff dose of it. For the past week or so I’ve been working on some tissue samples that have probably seen close to a dozen hours of solid work going into them. Today, [...]

If you wander into the home of a book-lover, you will find books everywhere, arranged neatly on shelves, lying on tables, sitting behind the toilet and stacked beside the bed. These are the books that have been read, and they enjoy a happy and fulfilled existence.
There is a darker side to life in this home. [...]

My first chemicals arrived today! It may come as a surprise to many, but it isn’t the case (not entirely, anyway) that I just hang around in Oxford waiting for interesting things to happen - occasionally I do some real research. In preparation for an experiment on the mouse visual system, I’ve ordered a bunch [...]

A recent conversation:
Him: I need to get a new mouse for my computer - the right button doesn’t work any more.
Me: Hmm, that sucks. I guess it means that you can’t-
Him: Yeah, I can’t crouch in Counterstrike any more, I can hardly play it now.
[beat]
Me: I was going to say, ‘write essays as quickly’ but [...]

He Was A Crook - Hunter S. Thompson’s damning eulogy for his arch-enemy, Richard Nixon. “Some of my best friends have hated Nixon all their lives. My mother hates Nixon, my son hates Nixon, I hate Nixon, and this hatred has brought us together. Nixon laughed when I told him this. “Don’t worry,” he said, [...]

I was out in Liverpool doing some shopping and sherpa-duty for a friend when I saw a wonderfully stupid sign for a herbalist in a shopping mall. I lamented to my friend that I didn’t have a camera with me, and then did a double-take and realised that I did - I’ve just bought a [...]

The great thing about not regularly drinking caffeinated beverages is that when you do, you get a real kick out of it. I basically never drink anything that contains any caffeine - no tea, no Coke and definitely no coffee. Every so often though, when I drink just a single cup of tea, I’ll feel [...]