From Network World:
Chemists at theUniversity of Washington in Seattle say they are developing ‘smart’ sunglasses that will let the wearer instantly change the color of their lenses to virtually any hue of the rainbow. So, whether you like your lenses clear, red, green, blue or purple, virtually any color could be obtained instantly by tuning a tiny electronic knob in the frame.
Add comment March 29th, 2007
From Stuff.co.nz:
Two Kiwi schoolgirls are worldwide celebrities after their school experiment forced an international pharmaceutical and food giant to admit it made false claims about vitamin C levels in Ribena.
Nice one, ladies!
2 comments March 28th, 2007
Shown above is what happens when Australian inventor and thief-hater Peter Terren adapts one of his many high voltage electrical contraptions to car protection. A Tesla coil generating a huge electrical field discharges into the ground as it rotates on a long boom. Any would-be car jacker with poor timing skills is zapped with a pleasing bolt of electrical justice.
Via Wired Blogs!
Add comment March 21st, 2007
It’s no secret that I can’t abide local papers. They’re predominantly boring, badly written, poorly researched versions of national newspapers. The Liverpool Echo is no exception. They’ve managed to irritate me greatly twice this week. Firstly, they published a story about a man climbing the Beetham Tower West crane (accompanied with a picture of the wrong building) when I’d climbed it months prior and sent them a press release with spectacular pictures. Second, they published this patent nonsense:
SUPER-strength cannabis so potent that just one puff can cause schizophrenia is being grown by Merseyside drug gangs.
Say what? Was author Ben Rossington freaking high when he wrote this? Just one paragraph later, the intrepid journalist begins his climbdown.
Experts warn this new strain of cannabis is so incredibly strong it can bring on the early signs of schizophrenia from a single puff.
Ah, so we’ve gone from causing schizophrenia to stimulating early symptoms of schizophrenia. Regardless of this being a humiliating sample of hysteria, it’s also not true. In fact, the entire Echo story is nothing but a poorly written, badly researched rehash (no pun intended) of a similar story found in the Independent on Sunday last weekend. And that story was itself an unfortunate slice of melodrama that was a sad day for an otherwise quality paper. Over at Transform Drug Policy Foundation, Steve R has written an excellent debunking of the IoS article.
Not to be outdone by a broadsheet, Ben Rossington also inserts this curious factoid:
Research to be published this week in The Lancet is said to show skunk, which has high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), is more addictive and socially dangerous than class A drugs such as LSD and ecstasy.
Before you credit Ben with any original research, have a look here, where the same sentence appears word-for-word in a Daily Mail article published two days before the Echo broke this sordid tale. What’s more, anyone with even a cursory knowledge of drugs knows that neither LSD nor ecstasy are addictive, and calling them “socially dangerous” is laughable at best. If we’re going to start worrying about “socially dangerous” activities, I think alcohol would be a better place to start. As it turns out, the study referred to here did find that alcohol was more “socially dangerous” than cannabis!
Is the Liverpool Echo so tired that the best it can manage is weak imitations of critically flawed articles? It took me less than an hour to dig out the flaws in this story, why couldn’t the Echo be bothered to do the same?
2 comments March 21st, 2007
Witness the mighty power of nature overcoming puny municipal defences in this incredible video. This was shot during a thunderstorm in Minnesota, which makes Minnesota officially the most awesome state in the US.
Thanks to Ian for this video!
1 comment March 19th, 2007
If you’re the type of person to worry about spilling red wine down that new dress, fear no more. Scientists have recently succeeded in creating outfits from red wine and other booze, using bacteria to turn fermented drinks into sheets of slimy material.
Researchers at the University of Western Australia worked on the Mirco’be’ project to encourage interest in the field. Noticing that a rubbery layer would grow on vats of wine when exposed to air, Gary Cass was inspired to apply the same process to create a wearable material. The fabric itself is made of cellulose, and is produced by aerobacter bacteria as a byproduct of converting wine into vinegar.
Vats of wine were deliberately allowed to spoil, and strips of cellulose were laid onto inflatable dolls. Once the dress was complete, the doll was deflated, leaving the dress intact. The bacterial action ensured the fibres were bound together, meaning that no stitching or sewing was necessary.
If you’re looking at the picture and wondering why anyone would want to look like a banshee wearing a singlet made from the stomachs of calves, do not be alarmed. The project is one of art as much as science, and the image represents a proof of concept. The model is made up to look like a cave woman emerging from a “primordial swamp”. There’s more than meets the eye though - the dress itself must be kept wet at all times, as it becomes brittle and tears easily once dry. This is due to the short length of the cellulose fibres. The team plan to collaborate with organic chemists to find a way to polymerise the fibres of cellulose enough to make a useable fabric.
The researchers hope that one day the technique will be used to grow seamless garments.
Add comment March 15th, 2007
Addendum - I’ve scanned in some of the promotional literature that was handed out during last week’s Monadith presentation. The document here promises “extraordinarily intensive deep action” whilst one customer enthuses “I felt a pleasant, warm sensation”. Ooh matron… (download pdf)
Add comment March 14th, 2007
As today is apparently Pi Day (3/14), what better time to learn to sing Pi to the first 100 or so places? You might also like to know Pi to one million places, just in case you want to sing a few more verses of your own.
Link to the Pi Song
Add comment March 14th, 2007
The personal diaries of the wife of Charles Darwin have been made available online. The BBC reports:
Emma Darwin’s notebooks cover six decades of the couple’s life together and provide an insight into the daily life of the Victorian scientist.
The first diary is dated 1824 when the then named Emma Wedgwood was just 16 years old.
The diaries reveal how the Darwins entertained visiting scientists - with guests sometimes numbering 10 or 15.
Personally I’m in two minds as to this development. On the one hand, I can see the value of these diaries in shedding light on Darwin the man, and no doubt they’ll be of interest to historians and biographers the world round. On the other hand, Darwin’s greatness lay not in his personality but in his science. In that respect, I’ve no interest in his personal life, what he ate for breakfast and how many friends he had round to dinner. There’s something quite voyeuristic about analysing Darwin’s private life when it’s not undertaken to illustrate and understand his science better.
Add comment March 12th, 2007
With surprising punctuality, those dear ladies from Monadith despatched the following email on Friday in response to our requests for hard scientific evidence to support their claims about bioresonance
Dear Mrs XXXX
In connection with our visit in your company I would like to express how grateful I am that you gave me the opportunity to introduce our Quit Smoking programm to your employees.
As I was asked by your employees to provide further information about our way of treatment I am enclosing two websides you can visit:
http://www.monadith.com.pl/literatura where you can find a list of available literature and www.regumed.de , webside of producer.
I would appreciate if you would be so kind and forward this information to your colleagues. If you require more details, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Kind Regards
Beata Milczarek
Monadith Ltd.
6 Royal Quay
tel. 0151 707 9874
0790 388 4622
This is disappointing, as I was hoping for something I could sink my teeth into, rather than a list of obscure references. I’ll have a dig through to see if there’s anything I can get my hands on, but this looks like the end of the line for our Monadith saga.
1 comment March 12th, 2007
Backstory: a company called Monadith, who claim to be able to cure smoking with bioresonance therapy, came to my office to present their nonsense. Anticipating their arrival, I organised a hit group of skeptics to attend, armed with revealing questions.
I think it went rather well.
Around noon, two Monadith reps set up in a tiny room in my office. Both Polish, both female, both young and pretty. Ripping into the reps was clearly going to be harder than I thought. Crowded into the room were ten of us - of which a full SEVEN were on my science hit squad!
The reps (we never did get their names) played two videos - a woefully uncritical BBC report on bioresonance, and a clip from science experts Richard and Judy espousing bioresonance (both of which Ben Goldacre has blogged about in the past). Then… well, actually, that was it. After the two videos, it was question time.
I have to say it made my heart swell with pride as my science hit squad launched into the women. I could barely get a word in edgeways. The poor duo were grilled for 40 minutes, the most brief of summaries I shall outline here:
“You said this treatment gets rid of the nicotine in your body, but nicotine leaves the body in 24 hours anyway. So how does this treatment have a continued effect”
“After 24 hours it is up to you to make the decision not to smoke.”
“How did you calculate the 90% success rate?”
“With statistics!”
“Er, yes, but after how long did you contact the smokers?”
“After one week we rang them to see if they still wanted to smoke”
“So the treatment is only successful for a week?”
“After that, if you decide to smoke it is your choice”
“Why don’t the NHS use this?”
“They don’t seem to want to, they say it doesn’t work but won’t research it”
“It’s not up to them to disprove your claim, it’s up to you to prove it”
“err….”
“When you take a ‘diseased’ reading pattern, how do you know what my healthy pattern is in order to cancel only the diseased part of the vibration?”
“I don’t understand…”
“Is there any clinical proof that this works?”
“No.”
“Who is this Polish doctor?”
“er… I don’t know. I’ve worked here for four years and I don’t know”
“If it is used to cancel pain, why doesn’t the pain come back as soon as the machine is turned off?”
“err….”
“Does the practitioner have a medical licence?”
“He has diplomas, yes”
“Ha, yes, but is he licensed to practise medicine?”
“In Poland, yes”
“Is he licensed to practise medicine in the UK?”
“No…”
All in all, we gave the ladies a rough time, and often they needed to converse in Polish (the one with more technological knowledge spoke less English). They sweated it out like troopers, and at the end asked if anyone would sign up with no real confidence in their voice. Seeing that these two were just the hand of the fraudster, and knew nothing more than what was on the leaflets, we lightened up. We explained that we wanted scientific evidence, and they brightened somewhat and promised to send us clinical proof. I am very much looking forward to that. On the way out, my friend asked one of the three potential customers what she thought. “Bloody ‘ell!”, she breathed “I’m going out for a ciggy!”
As we left for lunch, the concierge of the building had a stack of Monadith flyers on his reception. “You won’t need those”, my friend said, “it’s a fraud.”
“No”, he said adamantly, “it works. My friend hasn’t smoked since. You can’t tell me it doesn’t work”. Any feelings of success were, unfortunately, fleeting.
As I walked to the grocer stand for some lunch, I was handed a flyer. QUIT SMOKING it said. RENEWU! AS SEEN ON RICHARD & JUDY!
1 comment March 9th, 2007
Clocks and calendars are one of my long standing fascinations. Because time cannot be measured directly, there is an endless creativity displayed in timepieces that never ceases to amaze me. From the humble sundial to atomic clocks holding strontium atoms in a 3D laser mesh, the number of different solutions to the riddle of measuring passing time eloquently demonstrates the full breadth of human ingenuity and imagination.
As such, it gave me great pleasure to read that the Thirteen Towers of Chankillo, Peru, have been shown to be an ancient calendar - over 2,300 years old! Clive Ruggles, professor of archaeoastronomy at Leicester University, UK, said: “These towers have been known to exist for a century or so. It seems extraordinary that nobody really recognised them for what they were for so long.”
Can you imagine being anything as cool as an archaeoastronomer? Didn’t think so.
The Thirteen Towers are a series of rectangular structures, each no more than 125m2 in size, that run north-south along the crest of a low hill. Set a little over 200m away to the east and west are observation posts. From these positions, the span of the towers matches the change in position of the sunrise and sunset throughout the year. By noting which tower the sun fell behind, the ancient astronomers could calculate what time of year it was. As viewed from the western observation point, the sun would rise to left of the left-most tower at mid-winter, and to the right of the right-most tower in mid-summer.
I enjoyed this not just because it was an elegant and simple solution to the calendar problem, but also because it demonstrates a fusion of architecture and science, much like Stonehenge, or the awesome Jantar Mantar observatories in India. These are functional buildings, scientific instruments on a grand scale, and yet are also triumphs of engineering and construction. After all, will your wristwatch be ticking in the year 4307?
2 comments March 7th, 2007
As a lowly data monkey who spends a third of his life in the offices of a large multinational, I’m not subjected to half as much email spam and unfunny forwards as I deserve. Which made it all the more surprising when I received an offer to QUIT SMOKING in a mass email from the office manager.
Continue Reading 10 comments March 6th, 2007
Boing Boing reports:
LibriVox volunteers have just completed a public domain audio recording of Charles Darwin’s pivotal work, “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” — free to download, copy, and share. It’s unabridged and over twenty-four hours long!
I haven’t been so stoked since they stuck Darwin on the £10 note.
Add comment March 5th, 2007
| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Feb | Apr » | |||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
