Some exciting news!

26 Friday Apr 2013

Tags

Education, evolution, Nature Education, Popular science, science, Science communication, Science journalism, Scitable

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll soon be writing for a second blog in addition to Inspiring Science! The Scitable blog network, part of Nature Education’s online collaborative learning space, will be relaunching sometime soon and I’ve been asked to be one of the authors of the new blog about evolution. Joining me will be Sarah Jane Alger, who currently writes about animal behaviour on her excellent blog, The Scorpion and the Frog. Continue reading →

Falling faster than gravity

15 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by sedeer in Physics

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

chain, Free fall, freefall, gravity, Popular science, science, weird science

In 2011, a team of physicists at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York showed that when a falling chain hits something (say, a table), it might, contrary to all intuition, speed up and fall faster than it would if it fell freely. By carefully studying its mechanics, they showed how the impact could actually pull the remainder of the chain downwards. As this picture from their experiment shows, they were right. The two strange-looking chains were dropped from the same height at the same time, but the one on the left, which fell into a pile on a table, fell faster than an identical chain falling past the table.
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What brought you here?

03 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by sedeer in Blog

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

blogging

This morning I read a wonderful post on Alex Brown’s excellent blog, Do You Speak Science?, in which he addresses the questions that people search for before landing on his blog. I liked the idea so much that I decided to write a similar post over here at Inspiring Science. Let me know what you think of it — if you like the idea, I might make it a (semi-)regular feature! Continue reading →

Found while foraging (April 2, 2013)

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by sedeer in Foraging

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

art, bees, electric field, Erin Brockovich, gender, intersex, israel, Palestine, photography, plasma, Popular science, rape, science, science and society, Science in Society, sexism

It’s certainly been too long since my last Found while foraging! Since I haven’t been posting as frequently as I’d like, I’ve preferred to post about scientific topics when I had a chance to post. In the meantime, I’ve let my collection of links grow…so I decided to start the week with a Found while foraging and hopefully end it with a “proper” post. Anyway, here’s what I’ve come across in the last couple of months — hopefully it’s not an overwhelming collection! As always, feel free to add more links in the comments.
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An amazing critter with seven sexes!

29 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Genetics, Microbiology

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

biology, Mating type, Popular science, science, sex, Tetrahymena, Unicellular organism

If you’ve never heard of Tetrahymena thermophila, your world is about to get much stranger. This little beauty, a single-celled creature that’s been at the heart of many major discoveries, has seven sexes that can mate with each other! In a paper just published in PLoS Biology, a team of scientists have described the intricate dance of DNA editing and rearrangement which determines the sex of a new T. thermophila.

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Planck looks back at the first billion, billion, billionth of a second

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by sedeer in Astronomy

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Big Bang, CMB, Cosmic Background Explorer, Cosmic microwave background radiation, cosmology, ESA, European Space Agency, physics, Planck, Popular science, science, universe, WMAP

This morning, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the results from the Planck mission, a satellite designed to peer back at the earliest fraction of a second of the universe. It’s not our first glimpse of those early moments, but it’s the best look we’ve had to date. While the data from the Planck mission doesn’t overturn our understanding of the universe, it’s a treasure trove for theoretical physicists and brings some exciting questions to the fore.