Guest Work

New ways scientists can help put science back into popular culture

Guest Work • Jan 19, 2018

• conversations,
• movies,
• popular culture,
• science advisor,
• storytelling

Clifford Johnson, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. How often do you, outside the requirements of an assignment, ponder things like the workings of a distant star, the innards of your phone camera, or the number and layout … Read More

Everything you never wanted to know about bed bugs, and more!

Guest Work • Jan 19, 2018

• bed bugs,
• deprivation,
• ecology,
• fertility,
• nsects,
• traumatic insemination

Romain Garrouste, Muséum national d’histoire naturelle (MNHN) – Sorbonne Universités This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. If some insects could save the world, others do their best to seriously complicate life on Earth. Among them the prize perhaps goes to the bed bug, which after decades of absence … Read More

Mining the moon for rocket fuel to get us to Mars

Guest Work • Jan 18, 2018

• Earth,
• extraterrestial,
• Mars,
• mining,
• Moon,
• NASA,
• Orbit,
• planet,
• rocket fuel,
• solar system,
• space travel

Gary Li, University of California, Los Angeles; Danielle DeLatte, University of Tokyo; Jerome Gilleron, Georgia Institute of Technology; Samuel Wald, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Therese Jones, Pardee RAND Graduate School This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Forty-five years have passed since … Read More

Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, and the Royal Society

Jean Balchin • Jan 18, 2018

• Isaac Newton,
• Jonathan Swift,
• scientific progress,
• The Royal Society

The eighteenth century was an era of giddy scientific progress and the rejection of outdated beliefs. Observation and reason challenged preconceived notions about science, with the effects rippling into the religious and political spheres. Jonathan Swift was probably the most astute and innovative satirist of his age. As a High Anglican, Swift was greatly suspicious of the political and … Read More

Exploring Scotland’s Loneliest islands

Jean Balchin • Jan 18, 2018

• communism,
• gabbro,
• geology,
• granite,
• History,
• Scotland,
• sea stacks,
• st kilda,
• volcano

Out in the North Atlantic exist a collection of wild islands, rising in jagged ranks off the northwest coast of Scotland. Leaving my cosy cottage on Lewis, I set off across miles of ocean to the splintery archipelago of St Kilda, abandoned over a century ago. Here, the weather is a fickle, flighty mistress, cloaking the islands in mist … Read More

The psychology of pill testing

Guest Work • Jan 18, 2018

• drug testing,
• ecstasy,
• MDMA,
• pills,
• Psychology

By Dr Jez Weston Our clients have already purchased drugs and most already plan to use them. Yet when they discover that the substances they have are not the substances they presume them to be, half tell us that they will not take them. This is a significant percentage and, as far as we know, a far larger change … Read More

Did artists lead the way in mathematics?

Guest Work • Jan 18, 2018

• Alhambra,
• art,
• geometry,
• Leonardo da Vinci,
• mathematics,
• non-Euclidean geometry,
• painting,
• perspective,
• The Last Supper,
• tiling

Henry Adams, Case Western Reserve University This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. Mathematics and art are generally viewed as very different disciplines – one devoted to abstract thought, the other to feeling. But sometimes the parallels between the two are uncanny. From Islamic tiling to the chaotic patterns of Jackson … Read More

Data should smash the biological myth of promiscuous males and sexually coy females

Guest Work • Jan 17, 2018

• biology,
• courtship,
• evolutionary psychology,
• female,
• male,
• promiscuity,
• sex

Zuleyma Tang-Martinez, University of Missouri-St. Louis. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. That males are naturally promiscuous while females are coy and choosy is a widely held belief. Even many scientists – including some biologists, psychologists and anthropologists – tout this notion when interviewed by the media … Read More

The Journalist and the Murderer

Jean Balchin • Jan 17, 2018

• criminology,
• ethics,
• integrity,
• journalism,
• law,
• Murder,
• pathological narcissist,
• Psychology

‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.’ This is the opening line of Janet Malcolm’s sharp, analytical book The Journalist and the Murderer. Published in 1983, the book still challenges journalists these days. Malcolm is a cunning, insightful journalist. Read More

Death and Cyberspace

Jean Balchin • Jan 17, 2018

• cyberspace,
• death,
• internet,
• legacy

I first realised my brother was missing when I logged into Facebook one evening to see his bashful face grinning at me from a ‘MISSING’ notice. Rather absurdly, I wondered why they hadn’t picked a better photo of John instead of this blurry, orange-toned selfie. I continued scrolling through Facebook while frantically calling my family. Funny, innocuous videos of … Read More