I recently posted a somewhat sideways thought to twitter. Expanding the thought properly requires more than 140 characters, so I'll do it here rather than there.

Purple number one: VioletImagine looking at a rainbow. (If a real rainbow is available, stop wasting time reading this and go and look at it. Admiring pretty things is a vital and ( Read more... )

SpaceX have just successfully landed the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. From a technological viewpoint, provided that the rocket is indeed fully (or even mostly) reusable, that's a pretty big step forward. Even if that rocket can't be reused, it's a solid move towards making one that is. I was impressed ( Read more... )

( Trigger warning for the obvious, although if you weren't triggered by the post title, you're unlikely to be triggered by the content, which is fairly unemotional statistics rather than descriptive. )

As I wandered through our local supermarket, not buying anything (it was cold and dark and I wanted a walk somewhere that was air-conditioned and not raining), the label on a pack of bottles for minimising the hassle you get from airport security caught my eye. It asserted that the 100ml bottles in the bag were suitable for "All gels, foams, ( Read more... )

Not only did NASA manage to lower a one-tonne robot onto another planet using a sky-crane. They also managed to programme another robot three days in advance to take a photograph of this happening during the one-second interval when its camera would be pointed at the right spot ( Read more... )

Neuroskeptic presents the nine circles of scientific hell.

Also, various people have commented on the extremely honest campaign of Filipino politician Jun-Jun Sotto.

I'm going to get my book posts a bit more up-to-date, honest (being four months behind is a teeny bit embarrassing), but in the meantime:

One of the books I've not written up yet was Robert Peston's Who Runs Britain?. Coincidentally, Peston recently gave a very interesting lecture on the future of the media and journalism, which I recommend to ( Read more... )

Ed Yong of "Not Exactly Rocket Science" has done a fantastic parody of the media's deranged excesses over Darwinius masillae. Presumably as a break from his continued excellent writing on actual science.

This was bad enough. The idea that a major publisher of peer-reviewed science journals would publish a fake medical 'journal' in exchange for cash from a drug company is repulsive at best[0]. But they didn't stop at one. So far as anyone knows, this is limited to Elsevier's Australian division[1][2], but do you know what? I don't care. Even if ( Read more... )

Further to previous reports, the bridge connecting Wilkins ice shelf to Charcot Island has finally snapped. But you must understand that there's absolutely no evidence for anthropogenic global warming, and no need to do anything about carbon dioxide emissions or anything like that. Absolutely not.