A quick round-up of what I’ve been reading and listening to!
I have written before about my work on carrots, and it’s also the case that I have published on onions, in rather the same spirit as the carrot work: an environmental scanning electron microscopy study of onion failure, as well as a thorough study of maintaining viability of onion cells in the electron microscope under different conditions of Continue reading
Sometimes you look round and realise that the world has changed. It has been changing little by little so gradually that you didn’t notice but then you realise “Aha! The much predicted and talked-about convergence of TV and computing has happened!” You can buy a TV to watch YouTube videos on, you can watch regular TV programmes Continue reading
Back in January I was in North Carolina to participate in the Borafest—that is, Science Online 2011. The main reason for going was a little project cooked up with Jenny Rohn and Karen James. To wit: we wanted to film some women scientists who might be just as capable as any man at presenting sciencey-type programmes: the next female David Attenboro Continue reading
Wikipedia and its role in science keeps cropping up on my radar recently. Matt Jukes pointed out last week, in a talk to a group of Science Communications people, that a decent article in Wikipedia about a science topic would reach a far bigger readership than printed booklets, newspaper articles, or webpages on our local websites. Hence if we want Continue reading
It cannot have escaped your attention this past weekend that the Earth was treated to a supermoon. The correct terminology for this felicitous event is a perigee syzygy, but the reasons for the interesting nomenclature need not detain us.
The point is that Saturday night was clear in London and gave those of us who live there a magnificent view:
A few short weeks ago I posted a blog entitled “I’d rather be blasting homeopathy“, and provided two letters that I had written. One was addressed to my local Nebraska congressman, and asked that he be considerate of science and the NIH budget. The second was an irate response to an unjust parking ticket that I received when atten Continue reading
The lecture hall in my Institute dates back to the 1930s. It has a simple design with excellent acoustics, typical of its era. It is called the Fletcher Memorial Hall, which begs the question – who he? Just outside the hall there is a clue in the shape of a bust on a marble plinth. It portrays Sir Walter Morley Fletcher (1873-1933) who was th Continue reading
I wrote a couple of months back about the background to the Science & Technology Select Committee’s inquiry into peer review. The Select Committee has published all the written evidence submitted to its inquiry. The publication of written evidence provides a useful pointer to what are the key issues under consideration, though with 87 sub Continue reading
