SciencePunk » Featured Content

Herping With Dylan: homebrew nature doc

Frank the SciencePunk — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 21:39:41 +0000

Some time ago I came across this short video showing an enthusiastic young man and a den of poisonous Brown Recluse spiders. It was a charming video, and I took it as a one-off, so it’s my great pleasure to discover that it’s just one of a huge cache of nature-doc videos put together by Amanda [...]

RSS feeds and a new section!

Frank the SciencePunk — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:36:25 +0000

After a lot of wrangling, the RSS feed is finally working smoothly, and hopefully will stay that way. Currently the main feed incorporates SciencePunk and SciBlog articles, and the del.icio.us feed. I know everyone has their own way of reading the sites they love, so here is an exhaustive list of the different feeds from [...]

SciencePunk has evolved: new site launched!

Frank the SciencePunk — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 14:15:18 +0000

In case you hadn’t noticed, SciencePunk has seen a lot of changes over the past week. This is due to a couple of major developments: I’ve been invited to write for ScienceBlogs SciencePunk has gone turbo-upgrade to version 6! I’ve been planning an upgrade of the SciencePunk.com site for a long time, especially as I was never really [...]

Bush goes green, conserves huge slice of ocean. Or does he?

Frank the SciencePunk — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 12:05:16 +0000

Environmentalists are expressing surprise and optimism at the news that the outgoing US President George Bush has passed an executive order creating a Texas-sized conservation area in the Pacific Ocean. Normally, if I see the words 'size of Texas' and 'Pacific Ocean' I think, "Oh no, here we go with that stupid floating island of garbage story again". But fortunately for me this new story still has some interesting twists.

Can drinking water really kill you?

Frank the SciencePunk — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 16:54:49 +0000

A: Yes. As reported today, a mother-of-five died from a cerebral edema after drinking four litres of water less than two hours. Jacqueline Henson was following a diet plan which recommends that dieters drink up to four litres of water throughout the day. Normally the concentration of solutes in the brain is kept slightly lower than [...]

5 ways to kill an elephant

Frank the SciencePunk — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:23:12 +0000

Elephants are the world’s largest living land animal, which poses something of a problem when you need to make one of them the world’s largest dead land animal. Although much-loved by circus audiences and Roman conquerers, often there comes a time when an elephant needs to be killed, either because it is sick or in [...]

Just another example of inaccurate right-wing hyperbole

Frank the SciencePunk — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 16:56:18 +0000

Anyone who’s spent a reasonable amount of time in the UK will know of the Daily Mail, a highly popular right-wing newspaper which regularly twists itself into apoplectic fits of rage over homosexuals, immigrants, people on welfare, teenage mothers, and the state of England’s house prices. The beating heart of this publication is arguably columnist [...]

Five awesome substances that never existed

Frank the SciencePunk — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:33:35 +0000

The road to the truth is rarely straight or clearly signposted, and although the scientific method has managed to install a few streetlights along the way, there are still plenty of dead ends for the unwary to stumble into. Here I’ve collected a few examples of wonderful substances that have been bought, sold, collected, [...]