Category Archives: Series

Found while foraging (November 6, 2013)

06 Wednesday Nov 2013

Posted by in Foraging

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It’s November! That’s not usually an exciting time for me (Helsinki is cold, dark, and wet in November), but this year is an exception. In just under three weeks, I’ll be moving to another continent and starting to write full time! I’m really excited about the change and eager to get started with the next phase of my life…and I’m also very busy with the process of getting there, so Inspiring Science will be more quiet than usual over the next few weeks. Hopefully I’ll manage to find the time to post something, but in the meantime here are some tidbits to tide you over. (If that’s not enough for you, have a gander through some of the old posts or previous linkfests.) As always, feel free to add more links in the comments!
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Found while foraging (September 23, 2013)

23 Monday Sep 2013

Posted by in Foraging

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It’s been a while since my last Found while foraging.  I guess I’ve been busy for the past few months and these posts have somehow fallen by the wayside.  They seem to be popular, though, so I’ll make an effort to keep them up and post link collections more regularly.  I’m also happy to get interesting links from readers, so send me anything you think is interesting and worth sharing.  And as always, though, feel free to add more links in the comments!
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The laws of biology

26 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by in Discussions

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Science is our way of trying to understand the universe, to make sense of the patterns of objects and behaviours around us and explain the regularity of the world we experience. We use several different words to characterize the ideas and explanations we come up with. A hypothesis is an informed conjecture, a speculation about world which needs to be tested, while a theory is a well-supported, coherent framework which explains some aspect of the universe. Scientific “laws” seem to fall somewhere in between; while they’re very well-supported, they tend to assert things about the world rather than offer an explanation. For example, Newton’s law of gravity enables us to predict the gravitational attraction between two objects but doesn’t explain why objects are attracted to each other. Continue reading →

Found while foraging (July 3, 2013)

03 Wednesday Jul 2013

Posted by in Foraging

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I’m offline this week as I’ve retreated to one of my favourite places in the world for a holiday. I was too busy to prepare a post before leaving, but fortunately it’s about time for another Found while foraging.  Hopefully this post will be automatically published on Wednesday while I’m happily reading in front of a fire in a lovely cottage unburdened by the trappings of modernity — power, plumbing, and internet.  I’ve never pre-scheduled a post for publication before, so I hope it works.  I won’t link to many Scitable posts this time, but do pop over and have a look anyway; there’s some great stuff on there.  As always, though, feel free to add more links in the comments!
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Words of science: science

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Language, Words of Science

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Like many other fields, science has its own style of communication full of specific jargon and guided by unwritten rules.  Most of the posts on this blog focus on breaching this barrier to the public’s understanding and appreciation of science.  In this series, I’d like to take another approach by highlighting scientific words which have escaped the confines of jargon to reach a broader appeal because of their sound or their evocative power as metaphors.  Today’s word is a bit different from the earlier words; this time I’d like to talk about the word science itself. [Previous words of science were petrichor, alluvium, nychthemeron, crepuscular, and interstitial.]
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Found while foraging (May 28, 2013)

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by in Foraging

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It’s time for another Found while foraging!  I’m going to do things slightly differently this time.  Instead of just sharing various tidbits I’ve come across online since last time, I’m going to focus on science-related stuff to celebrate the recent launch of my new blog, Accumulating Glitches, as part of Nature’s Scitable network.  I’d also like to take the opportunity to also point you towards some of my favourite posts from the other new blogs in the relaunched network.  I hope you’ll find them enlightening and entertaining!  As always, though, feel free to add more links in the comments!
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