Beamlines

This sounds a bit like a Dalek invasion.  But in fact it’s research from Arizona State University:

How a fish ‘broke’ a law of physics... says a press release from Bristol University.

Yesterday evening, on BBC4 Television, I watched a repeat of Guts: The Strange and Wonderful World of the Human Stomach.  TV presenter Michael Mosley was the main exhibit in a public experiment at the Science Museum in London, exploring the inside story of the human digestive system.  He swallowed a mini camera in a pill that took photographs three times a second as it passed through his gut. 

The BBC (cue: Land of Hope and Glory!) has just started yet another series on Chinese food.  In Exploring China: A Culinary Adventure, two famous chefs, the illustrious Ken Hom OBE and the rising star Ching-He Huang (黃瀞億) (neither of whom has an entry in Chinese Wikipedia) are travelling around China, and so far have been travelling around the region of Beijing, encountering a Grandmaster of Peking Duck.  Crisp skin and moist meat are essential, but the Chinese are becoming increasingly health-conscious, and over half of the ducks they eat are now of a reduced-fat v

This is an almost verbatim copy of a press release from the London Centre for nanotechnology.When Watson, Crick and Wilkins discovered the DNA double helix nearly sixty years ago, they based their structure on an X-ray diffraction image (courtesy of Franklin) averaged over millions of DNA molecules (derived from squid sperm, I understand). Though the double helix has become iconic for our molecular-scale understanding of life, thus far no-one has ever “seen” the double helix of an individual double-stranded DNA in its natural environment, i.e, salty water.

For about a day I had been trying to read Real Clear Science, particularly the article linked Evolution Debate: Blame Atheists.  Alas, every time I visited the site I got a message:This site is temporarily down and we are working on restoring service. Sorry for the inconvenience.It’s now back up, but in the interim I have taken the opportunity, since I run on OScar from Sesame Street Systems, to have a Grouch.  Fear not, North Americans, it is directed at my fellow Brits.

Browsing, as I do from time to time, recent German news in thelocal.de, I came acrossSchoolboy cracks age-old maths problem

A few months ago, I read Electric Universe by David Bodanis (ISBN 1400045509).  There are two chapters on radar during the Second World War, #7 dealing with Britain’s defences and #8 dealing with the area bombing of Germany, a tactic down to ‘Bomber’ Harris, which to this day gives rise to doubt in Britain, such that we feel a conflict between honouring the bomber crews who sustained the heaviest proportional loss of all our armed forces, and disturbance at the methods of their commander, who went for mass

Perfluorinated Polar Bears!  No, this is not an exasperated exclamation by Captain Haddock, but might well be a shout of surprise at learning that Canadians have been searching for compounds of that nature in these snowy animals.  But why should Scott Mabury and his group at the University of Toronto be looking for them? The simple answer is that they are terribly persistent in the environment.  Bit odd, one might link, considering that Fluorine is the most reactive of all the elements in the periodic table.  So reactive[1], in fact, that 

Botany: A Blooming HistoryThe last episode of the series by Timothy Walker majored on the exploits of noble scientists whose aim was

Botany: A Blooming HistoryAnd now we come to part three of this series