The 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein. It’s split equally among three scientists, Osamu Shimomura, Martin Chalfie, and Roger Y. Tsien (and just out of curiousity, how do they choose the order in which they list those names?). The citation just says “for the discovery and… Continue reading Chemistry Nobel for Glowing Green Stuff
Category: Science
Science Blogging: What Is It Good For?
I got some interesting comments on last week’s post about the science blogging bubble, and there were two in particular I wanted to highlight. Bee wrote (among other things): But what I think are further obstacle to blogging is the inappropriateness of the medium to science. E.g. blogs put by format an emphasis on novelty,… Continue reading Science Blogging: What Is It Good For?
What’s the Matter With Biologists?
Paul Ginsparg, the founder of the arxiv preprint server for physics, has a very nice article at Physics World reminiscing about the rise of the Internet, particularly in physics. This also serves as a nice counterpoint to his talk at the Science21 conference (video, microblogging), which included a wealth of fascinating information about the current… Continue reading What’s the Matter With Biologists?
Physics Nobel to Particle Theory
The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been announced. Half will go to Yoichiro Nambu “for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics,” with the other half split between Makoto Kobayahi and Toshihide Maskawa, “for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at… Continue reading Physics Nobel to Particle Theory
Everything and More by David Foster Wallace
The best way– really, the only way– to sum up David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Brief History of ∞ is by quoting a bit from it. This comes from the middle part of the book, after a discussion of Fourier series, in one of the “If You’re Interested” digressions from the main discussion:… Continue reading Everything and More by David Foster Wallace
Longitude by Dava Sobel
Jennifer Ouellette’s pop-science book project post and the discussionaround it reminded me that I’m really shockingly ill-read in this area. If I’m going to be writing pop-science books, I ought to have read more of them, so I’ve been trying to correct that. Hence, Longitude, which I actually read a few weeks ago at the… Continue reading Longitude by Dava Sobel
The Metastable Xenon Project
Over the past several weeks, I’ve written up ResearchBlogging posts on each of the papers I helped write in graduate school. Each paper write-up was accompanied by a “Making of” article, giving a bit more detail about how the experiments came to be, what my role in them was, and whatever funny anecdotes I can… Continue reading The Metastable Xenon Project
The Science Blogging Bubble Ends?
Over at Nature Networks, Timo Hannay has posted a conference talk in which he questions the future of science blogging: “Science blogging is growing” I confidently wrote in an essay a few months ago. Then, like any good scientist, I went in search of evidence to support my prejudice. But I couldn’t find any beyond… Continue reading The Science Blogging Bubble Ends?
Marketing Science
Via FriendFeed, I came across an article by Deepak Singh on attention and science, which spins off a long rant by Kevin Kelly on the idea that Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Deepak writes: Attention can be driven by many mechanisms, marketing being the most effective one. The key is gaining sufficient mindshare,… Continue reading Marketing Science
Why So Many Words?
Sometime last week, I was directed to Chris Wilson’s article in Slate, which comes with the provocative subtitle “Why can’t science journalists just tell it like it is when it comes to particle physics?” I flagged this as a good jumping-off point for a blog post about how hard it is to communicate science to… Continue reading Why So Many Words?