Free Lantern » Science

New findings on deep-sea fish with tubular eyes and transparent head

Ali — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:26:48 +0000

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently shed light on the mystery of a fish with tubular eyes and a transparent head. What an amazing fish, watch the video and if you want to read more see here.

Teaching Creationism in Germany

Ali — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 15:46:49 +0000

A friend of mine send me a video documentary in YouTube (Von Göttern und Designern, Christlicher Fundamentalismus part 1) about a School in Germany in which they teach “Intelligent Design” in parallel to Evolution theory. Although they teach both “theories” to children the school teacher says that he believes in creationism and as a result influences the opinion of the students. Unfortunately the Documentary is only in German so if you can understand German here is the first part of it.
The funniest (or the saddest) part of it is about a Museum in the US where in an interview one of the museum workers explains that “the Dianasours were vegetarian in Heaven and used their teeth and nails to pick and eat heavenly fruits!”.
Yesterday I also read PZ Myers post about the Gaurdian’s article on British creationism, it seems that they are invading Europe seriously.
If you watch the documentary and/or read the Gaurdian’s paper and need to cool down you can do so by watching “Creationism: A Cautionary Tale” from atheristcartoons.com.

Obama on Science and Evolution

Ali — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:59:50 +0000

A new Gallup Poll shows that only 39% of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36% don’t have an opinion either way. According to their work which is based on telephone interviews with 1,018 adults, believing in evolution has a strong relationship to educational level. I think there is not much to say. Fortunately President Obama does appreciate Darwin and Science. Listen and watch his views on Science and notes on Darwin’s Birthday:

Scientist: “to be[come] or not to be[come]“

Ali — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:50:22 +0000

A few days ago a friend of mine send me an article by an American University professor Jonathan I. Katz with the title “Don’t become a Scientist!”. It is very interesting point of view.
In the last few days I have been thinking a lot about this article. Of course for me is rather late now as I have done my PhD and am doing a Post Doc but maybe it is not too late. Well I’m still leaving all options open and see what is coming next…
Talking about scientists and grad students many of you might have been wondering if the economy crisis will have an effect on grad students or not. Here is the ultimate answer by PhD comics:
The Economy Meltdown: Should you be concerned?

Ca ; De ; UK

That is called a collaboration!

Ali — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:59:20 +0000

A colleague of mine was searching for an article in Pubmed today and because of typing mistake she found this article. This is an article in Physics Journal (PDF original paper), and the reason I’m writing about it is the number of authors (I did not count but definitely more than 200 authors) and these authors are are from 74 institutions. I don’t know anything about the field of this paper but as a biochemist this number of authors was funny and surprising for me!

Beer is bad for scientists!

Ali — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:40:04 +0000

In the recent volume of Lab times I read about the (bad) effect of beer on number of publications by scientists! (You can read the online version here Page 14). Well, honestly sometimes if there was no hope of one (or a few) cold beer after work scientific work could’ve been much more difficult don’t you agree? So Cheers! )

Original article

New York Times article discussing this

P.S. The picture is the German Hefe Weizen (wheat beer) which is my favorite “publication reducing” agent.

PostDoc

Ali — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:28:01 +0000

Sometimes my friends who are not in the field of science ask me what is a PostDoc! Well I finally found the perfect answer for these questions!

Watch the series of PostDoc comics in PhDcomics to see what I mean comic1; comic2; comic3; comic4. I had also previously posted a comic from PhD comics here.

UK , US

Right handed DNA

Ali — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 07:19:38 +0000

Well it seems that this comic explains why DNA, Collagen and alpha helix are all right handed.

Take a look at Madeline’s comic page you can find other funny scientific comics.

PCR Song!

Ali — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 15:05:36 +0000

Those of you who have something to do with biology know the importance of PCR in molecular biology today, for those of you who don’t know what Polymerase Chain Reaction is (or don’t care), in short one can say PCR did the same thing to Molecular Biology research that Transistor did to electronics! This is a video-song called PCR song, watching it you can also know a bit more what PCR can do! The song was made as an advertisement for Bio-Rad PCR machines and similar to USA for Africa song! In the rest of this post I also attach the Lyrics. Here you can find the original video and download it. I like it when at the end one of the guys is dancing with a PCR machine! )

The PCR Song
There was a time when to amplify DNA,
You had to grow tons and tons of tiny cells.
Then along came a guy named Dr. Kary Mullis,
Said you can amplify in vitro just as well.
Just mix your template with a buffer and some primers,
Nucleotides and polymerases, too.
Denaturing, annealing, and extending.
Well it’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do.

PCR, when you need to detect mutations.
PCR, when you need to recombine.
PCR, when you need to find out who the daddy is.
PCR, when you need to solve a crime.
(repeat chorus)

Kary Mullis, the one who developed PCR
Polymerase Chain Reaction in Wikipedia

Biodiesel

Ali — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 00:17:11 +0000

The first Biodiesel powered Jet:
Scientific Americal: A 1968 L-29 Czechoslovakian jet—dubbed BioJet 1—flew up to 17,000 feet
(5,180 meters) over 37 minutes powered 100% on cooking oil. A three minute, 15-second test the day
before was the world’s first flight entirely fueled by cooking oil.
Talking about Fuel and alternative energy sources, in Nature collections, you can find Energy collections (Accessible for free), which is a collection of articles on different sources of energy. I’m sure you can find useful information there. These collections are really valuable one just has to find the time and surf through them.