Improbable Research

Susanna Lewis has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I wish to gently protest the ageism implied in ?From that lone, Pinkerian seed, there has grown a spreading chestnut, black, blond, and red-haired membership tree?. I am a molecular biologist; my group and I work on DNA palindromes. I would be honored to become a member of the LFHCfS.

Susanna M. Lewis, Ph.D., LfHCfS
Associate Professor
Graduate Department of Molecular & Medical Genetics
University of Toronto
&
Senior Scientist
Genetics and Genome Biology
Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

This first paragraph of an obituary in the September 16, 2007 Boston Globe raises the modern standard for good, evocative explanation:

Years before she blazed trails with research in cell biology and trained generations of aspiring scientists at Harvard Medical School, Elizabeth Hay was just a young woman who liked to take things apart. Animals, preferably.

DESCRIPTION OF EVENT:

As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the “turn over cart” at approximately 7:15 PDT today, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. (See attached photo). The 18′ long spacecraft was about 3′ off the ground when it fell.

The mishap was caused because 24 bolts were missing from a fixture in the ?turn over cart?. Two errors occurred. First, technicians from another satellite program that uses the same type of ?turn over cart? removed the 24 bolts from the NOAA cart on September 4 without proper documentation. Second, the NOAA team working today failed to follow the procedure to verify the configuration of the NOAA ?turn over cart? since they had used it a few days earlier.

So says the Earth Science Missions Anomaly Report: GOES/POES Program/ POES Project: 6 Sep 2003.

Alan Roach indirectly raises two simple questions:

1. Is the zebrafish an animal?
2. What is a large number, as compared with a small number?

The August 27, 2007 issue of Chemistry & Industry explains:

Zebrafish have the potential to reduce dramatically the number of animals that are used for testing in drug discovery.

UK biotechnology company Summit is one company that has pioneered their use… “The zebrafish redefines the phrase ‘breeding like rabbits’ as every female can produce up to 300 embryos a week,” Summit’s director of biology, Alan Roach, said. “We make 10,000 a day.”

Arm-wrestling machines (mentioned here yesterday) are still causing mahem, says investigator Brigitte Dalton, who alerts us to an August 21, 2007 Associated Press report, which begins:

Lose a game of chess to a computer, and you could bruise your ego. Lose an arm-wrestling match to a Japanese arcade machine, and you could break your arm.

Distributor Atlus Co. said Tuesday it will remove all 150 “Arm Spirit” arm wrestling machines from Japanese arcades after three players broke their arms grappling with the machine’s mechanized appendage.