Recently, we announced a competition for the best/funniest protein names. Now, after great debate among the professional judges, I am proud to report the winning protein names for this year’s contest.
Drumroll, please…
First Place: INDY-I’m not dead yet
from Cath Ennis
One is accustomed, I suppose, to coming across strange things on Cromer beach. The apparition that greeted Crox Minor and I earlier today, though, takes the sausage biscuit. Something seemed strange even from a distance, as we discovered when approaching the beach from the Stairs of Cirith Ungol.
Last Friday night as I watched U2 play Glastonbury on TV, the stream of hatred on Twitter was relentless. A torrent of unforgettable ire. I’ve long known that Bono and his band excite very mixed reactions, but this seemed to take things higher. Their music is not to everyone’s taste but on this occasion the bilious flood stemmed from th Continue reading
Some of you will recall that chez Crox tends to be mentioned in dispatches as the ‘Maison des Girrafes’ for reasons that few will now remember, and that this appellation is commemorated in signage.
Now that The Build is done, Crox Minima and I decided that we needed a few finishing touches, so we hurried to the Sticky Earth Café in Cro Continue reading
Long-time readers may remember my friend Kyrsten’s famous guest post about Bob the bot fly.
Bob in March 2008.
Commenters’ reactions on the original post ranged from mild (“kinda icky”) to ambivalent (“horrible. Continue reading
Back in April — it seems so long ago now — I wrote about the problems created in university life science courses by the relatively low uptake of maths by the student intake.
It provoked a very long and thoughtful discussion, both beneath the blog post and in email exchanges that I had with many of my colleagues. I am extremely grateful to everyone Continue reading
Or, rather, not just any other new open access journal. The Wellcome Trust, the Max Planck Society and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have announced that they are to launch a new top-tier open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The first issue of the journal, whose name has yet to be decided, is expected to be publishe Continue reading
Google never stands still. It is forever seeking to improve the way it tries to match your search request to its database, and then to show you potentially useful websites. Mostly we are not aware of how it does this, or when it makes changes to its methods. Since the launch of Google instant last year, though, it has become more obvious that Goog Continue reading
Here’s an astounding slo-mo video of a cymbal strike:
Isn’t that amazing?!
I mean, you know at some intellectual level that sound is a wave caused by the vibration of a solid object… but actually seeing that? Continue reading
Prizes for Women? Again? What more can I possibly have to say, having written twice (here and here) in different veins on this subject already. Tomorrow I chair the jury to judge this year’s L’Oreal/UNESCO For Women in Science UK and Ireland Fellowships, and the truth is I think there is still much to say, both about the specifics of this prize a Continue reading
