What does Brain say about alcohol consumption by youths? Read his study, and ponder it on New Year’s Eve. The study is: “Crime and Disorder, Binge Drinking and the Licensing Act 2003,” Kevin Brain, Institute of Alcohol Studies Occasional Paper, January 2000. In it, Kevin Brain says: I… suggest that, currently, young drinkers are caught […]
Year: 2007
Distant rapid thumb feedback
Today we emailed our editorial board the news that the magazine is now Open Access. Just minutes after we in Cambridge (Massachusetts, USA) sent the message, this reply arrived from ed board member Dr. Mark Benecke, who was at that moment on a high-speed train somewhere in Germany:
Babies so cute you could eat them
Investigator Wendy Cooper of Canberra writes: This photo was taken on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia on a recent visit. The sign was outside an establishment that you north Americans would call a “diner”
Biochemistry Lesson: The manifold uses of hormones.
Hormones, chemical messengers, play many roles in the body. Researchers are still exploring and discovering new (to the researchers) uses. One such is reported in the October 11 issue of The New York Post: One of the world’s richest and most secretive hedge funds is telling its traders to swallow female hormones to trade better, […]
The the interview (Browne on Browne)
What did you win your prize for? I won my prize for an article written six years ago about how we should alphabetise index entries that start with ‘The’. Most of the rules suggest that you should look for The Beatles and The Bible at ‘B’, but The Hague and first lines of poetry such […]
Tucker Jones joins LFHCfS
Tucker Jones has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Liz George, who nominated him, says: Tucker Jones has had luxuriant flowing hair for as long as I’ve known him. Not only is it beautiful, but it is also soft! He graduated from MIT with a BS in Physics and is now doing a […]
Formulaic fashioning of fun formulas
Frank Swain laments the torrent of cute, quickie formulas loosed upon and lapped up by news media. He writes: It was too much to hope for to get through the season without someone, somewhere, attaching their name to a bogus scientific formula and calling it news. Ever since McVities paid Dr Len Fisher to come […]
Mucus found
The fact that it took researchers this long to realize that jellyfish were in fact enormous floating mucus bags might be the more remarkable revelation here. So writes Zoologix. UPDATE: Investigator Amber writes: It happens occasionally that some blog posts in my reader will seem to mimic posts from other blogs. This came through today […]
Glittery pregnancy test for rhinos
Feeding different-coloured sparkling glitter to two female white rhinos has acted as an impromptu pregnancy test.To keep a check on the hormone levels of Ashanti and Zanta, authorities at Dublin Zoo – who are hoping to breed the animals – added blue and silver glitter to their feed to tell the faeces apart for analysis…. […]
Does it rain more on weekends? (update)
David Schultz tells how he researched and wrote his study “Does it rain more on the weekends?” (published in AIR 4:2), and discusses subsequent research on the subject: When I first arrived in Norman, Oklahoma, for my postdoctoral fellowship in 1996, one of the first projects I started on my own was to see if […]