Latest posts

AdHederance

Posted on 27 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Over the festive period I’ve been ploughing through a volume of some vastness entitled 65 Great Tales of the Supernatural (ed. Mary Danby). I bought this grimoire secondhand a long time ago. It contains many well-anthologised old chestnuts such as The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson; Lost Hearts by M. R. James; The Red Room by H. Continue reading →

Posted in Domesticrox, elizabeth walter, holly, ivy, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on AdHederance

Photographs of 2020

Posted on 27 December 2020 by Stephen

My computer tells me that I took over 2,400 photographs in 2020. Here are my favourites. I’m afraid I have failed to whittle them down to fewer than seventy-five. Click on the first image, taken on a winter walk on the first of January, to go to the album on flickr.

Photos of 2020

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Memories of Trains

Posted on 23 December 2020 by Athene Donald

What a rubbish year this has been, on different fronts. We are in a far worse state than could conceivably have been imagined this time last year and, the start of vaccinations apart, there is little light visible to cheer us up over our rather solitary – given last minute Government instruction – Christmases. However, I was set off in an unexpected direction yesterday, by a tweet, which distracte Continue reading →

Posted in Glenfinnan, health and safety, London, travel | Comments Off on Memories of Trains

Litreview

Posted on 20 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Yes, it’s that time again, when I list the books in the year just passed that I have most enjoyed. I’ve been doing this since 2014. That’s when I started noting authors and titles of books I’d read in a small notebook given me one Christmas by my friend H. F. of Edgefield.

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Posted in a dominant character, a suitable boy, Alexander Hamilton, american gods, anansi boys, borges, bram stoker, colour of magic, dirtyfilthysexy, discworld, dracula, entangled life, erin morgenstern, fungi, garlic, good omens, james bond, JBS Haldane, just william, kurt vonnegut, Lin-Manuel Miranda, merlin sheldrake, neil gaiman, olaf stapledon, psilocybin, Ron Chernow, samanth subramanian, scarlett thomas, slaughterhouse five, star maker, terry pratchett, the end of mr Y, The Night Circus, the starless sea, tolkien, van helsing, vietnam war, vikram seth, Writing & Reading | Comments Off on Litreview

Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

Posted on 15 December 2020 by Athene Donald

I’ve railed against pinkification, and the ‘gift of pink’ in the past – especially at this time of year when presents, notably toys and clothes, are to the fore for Christmas purchase. I hadn’t realised that books, too, come with gender neatly attached from an early age, not just toys and clothes. Amazon at least wants to direct grandparents like myself to different pages, and different sorts of b Continue reading →

Posted in Books, education, Equality, Fawcett Society, gender stereotypes | Comments Off on Why Unicorns Aren’t the Answer

Naturistical

Posted on 14 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Thirty-three years ago today Sgt Pepper taught the band to play I started work at Nature. I joined as a junior news reporter on a three-month contract. It’s the longest three-month contract anyone has ever had.

Because I am a monster of vanity and arrogance people sometimes ask me how I got to be where I am today, I have decided to write this as a kind of public service. So pay attention. Continue reading →

Posted in bacterial genomes, Electric Banana, extrasolar planets, feathered dinosaurs, hobbits, human genomes, John Maddox, journalism, long-playing records, mammoths, Motorhead, nature, new scientist, radiological protection guidelines, The Thunderer, Writing & Reading, yetis | Comments Off on Naturistical

Misterious

Posted on 10 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Yesterday I drove Mrs Gee, a student nurse at the University of East Anglia, to UEA where she had to do some necessary admin that couldn’t be done remotely. While she was doing that, Posy the Golden Retriever took me for a walk in Earlham Park, which is just across the road. Earlham Park is lovely. Huge swathes of grassland punctuated by the occasional stately tree. Posy was delighted.

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Posted in Apparitions, desert, dog, Earlham Park, fist, fog, fossils, landscape, Leakey, Lomekwi, mist, mog, navigation, norwich, palaeontology, Science Is Vital, self-similarity, Turkana, UEA | Comments Off on Misterious

The Need for Bounce

Posted on 6 December 2020 by Athene Donald

What would you feel if someone described you as a ‘demoralised pile of pulp’? I was distinctly taken aback by this extreme phrase, describing myself – by myself. It referred to the ‘me’ I had been a year previous to the moment of writing, during the time I had been a spectacularly unsuccessful postdoc. The phrase turned up in one of a large pile of letters written to my mother – perhaps I wrote a Continue reading →

Posted in failure, pandemic, Research, resilience, Science Culture | Comments Off on The Need for Bounce

Dreamages

Posted on 3 December 2020 by Henry Gee

Oh, these dreams. I don’t know whether it’s the present situation, or the drugs, but I do have the most vivid dreams these days. Sometimes they are photo-realistic … except that the reality is not as one might expect.

Some years ago when these drugs were just recent invaders of my system I dreamed I was in conversation with a close colleague. I’d have sworn it was real exce Continue reading →

Posted in Cromer crabs, Dreaming, dreams, Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright, Leeds University, Portuguese cuisine, Science-fiction, Silliness, Springfield (Illinois), University Challenge, venlafaxine | Comments Off on Dreamages

No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding

Posted on 2 December 2020 by Stephen

This week DeepMind has announced that, using artificial intelligence (AI), it has solved the 50-year old problem of ‘protein folding’. The announcement was made as the results were released from the 14th and latest competition on the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). The competition pits teams of computational scientists against one another to see whose m Continue reading →

Posted in Protein Crystallography, science | Comments Off on No, DeepMind has not solved protein folding