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Lab: The Show
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on Lab: The ShowDuring 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…
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Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid
Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist at Imperial College, has written a piece in the New York Times yesterday called Some Things Are Better Left on Mars, where she argues that the risk of infection by Martian lifeforms far outweighs any scientific gain from bringing back rock and soil samples. Given that we know organisms on…
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Genetic Enhancement
The Atlantic ran an anti-genetic enhancement article this month called The Case Against Perfection. Written by Michael J. Sandel, a member of the notorious President’s Council on Bioethics, the article is cogent and well-argued. Essentially Sandel believes that embryonic or hereditary genetic enhancements would remove the ‘giftedness’ of every child – in other words, the…
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Superluminal
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…
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Snapshot
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,…
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The Sunny State
After a week of dismal weather and tiring winds that sap all of the enjoyment out of cycling, not to mention dozens of niggling problems at the lab and a whole host of other things, things have finally started to improve here in Oxford. Yesterday I found out that I’ll be going to a vision…
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Inarticulate
The Guardian’s Life section (science) has an article about the impenetrable writing favoured by scientists when writing in journals. This is hardly a new development but it’s no less interesting or disappointing for it; what is disappointing is that the author, Chris McCabe, has reduced this interesting subject to a directionless and misguided article, which…
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Tutorials &c.
So many things have happened in the past week! A final success at badminton, boardgame tournaments, computational neuroscience, strange and wonderful things happening on the next planet out, lots of good new books, and tutorials. I will deal with them all in time, but first, tutorials. One of the distinguishing features of Oxbridge is the…
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Work and hair
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…
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Who wants the Gobi Desert?
Bruce Sterling, SF writer, has pointed out that the Gobi Desert is far more hospitable than Mars, so before we ever settle Mars we’ll have settled the Gobi Desert (i.e. not any time soon). He also points out that by the time we have the ability to terraform Mars, we’ll be doing much more interesting…
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