Everything: What’s Missing Is What Gets Scientists Most Excited

What makes most scientists most excited is the same thing that—if they’ve heard about it—makes many non-scientists wonder if scientists are nuts: Way more than half of “the stuff the universe is made of” is still a mystery to scientists. Which may strike you as a crazy thing to realize, and a crazy thing to say. […]

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ reveals the identity of its 2017 Woman of the Year

TODAY IN OSLO: In front of an audience at the University of Oslo (UiO), The Luxuriant Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) proudly announced its 2017 Woman of The Year – Dr. Anneleen Kool. Dr. Kool was in attendance to discuss her research on the botanical history of the Vikings and to display her luxuriant flowing […]

Least Interesting Units: a new concept for enhancing one’s academic career opportunities

In these days where ‘Publish or Perish’ pressures are rife in academia, scholars who wish to enhance their career opportunities might want to turn to the work of dr.ir. Marcoen J.T.F. Cabbolet, who is a research affiliate at the Free University of Brussels. In a new paper for the journal Science and Engineering Ethics he […]

Things to say, professionally, of small significance

The Still Not Significant blog lists lots of ways to mutter, in professional language, if your research findings are statistically marginal. Among them: What to do if your p-value is just over the arbitrary threshold for ‘significance’ of p=0.05? … The solution is to apply the time-honoured tactic of circumlocution to disguise the non-significant result as […]

Hospital study pushes the buttons of bacteria-phobes

Canadian elevator buttons just might hold the key to a return in popularity for the “anti-microbial” cleaning products industry. Recently, three doctors in Toronto wrote a little study about the bacteria they found on hospital elevator buttons. The great washed public, reading that report (or scary reports about that report — maybe scarier than the one you are reading right […]

A call to help unexpected discoveries get discovered

Several well-known, much-respected scientists published this letter in The Guardian: We need more scientific mavericks “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts,” said Richard Feynman in the 1960s. But times change…. [But now,] applicants’ proposals must convince their peers that they serve national policies and are the best possible uses of resources. [A large […]