I’m a bit ashamed to admit it, but I came to The Hobbit late in life. Like three years ago. I’d been hearing about it for years from Tolkien enthusiasts – my teen son prime among them – but it wasn’t enough to make me crack open that volume and care about toe hair until…
Barbie Can’t Be a Computer Engineer. Because She is a Girl.
When I was a teenager, I broke up with Barbie. Not in a I stopped playing with Barbies kind of way, more in a burning this scourge from the face of the Earth kind of way. I don’t know what the final impetus was – that I realized Barbie’s itty-bitty ankles would snap like tiny…
So You Want To Be A Superhero
And soon, you’ll be able to fulfill that superhero dream. Because, science. That’s right, scientists are currently attempting to make all our dreams come true with this stretchable conducting cable. The fiber itself is made from sheets of carbon nanotubes wrapping around a rubber core. Oh, that sounds boring? Well, do flexibile exoskeletons and morphing aircraft sound…
How to Sabotage Your Coworkers: A Primer for Chemistry Grad Students
Welcome to grad school in chemistry! Most people envision it as an intellectually stimulating environment, in which everyone helps each other out to achieve common goals. Unfortunately, many of you chemistry grad students are lazy bastards. You don’t give a damn about your research, are only in grad school to impress your friends and family,…
America, It’s Time To Freak Out About Killer Shrimp
Forget the killer tomatoes. Don’t stress about the zombie apocalypse. Turns out you should be worried about shrimp. Yes, the Dikerogammarus villosus, aka killer shrimp, to be exact. This species makes its home in the area around the Black and Caspian Seas. For the geographically challenged, that includes such places as Romania, Turkey, Russia, Iran,…
4 CERN Songs You Should Listen To
You may have heard Alpine Kat’s incredibly awesome rap about the Large Hadron Collider: But did you know that there is also a response rap? Yep, the guys at Fermilab just couldn’t let the LHC get all the attention. Or, at least their friends over at Nerdcore couldn’t. And Alpine Kat isn’t the only one…
Interpretive Dance and PhD Theses: Opposites Attract
Each year the American Association for the Advancement of Science runs the most absurdly awesome competition ever created: Dance Your PhD. Yep, you read that right. Doctoral candidates in the sciences work tirelessly for years on cutting edge projects that will add something original to their field and then they think…huh, I wonder what this…
Sexing A Dinosaur
ZOMG. Get your mind out of the gutter. We would never write about dinosaur sexxxytime. We are not that kind of blog. Well, except that one time. At band camp. No. What we are talking about is exciting news in the field of paleontology: finally, scientists believe they can accurately differentiate between male and female…
Perfect Plans For Pi Day
Fine, whatever, yes, this is pretty arbitrary, or dare we say…irrational. Heh. But still, it’s kinda cool when numbers and dates collide, right? Like in the eighties when it was 8am on the 8th of August, ’88? Anywho, we were thinking about how the arbitrary and Hallmark-y nature of Valentine’s Day makes it totally suck…
All Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Made Of Trees
Let’s see – how many mobile devices1 have YOU burned through since you joined the cell phone club back in the late 90s? Among all the Nokias, flip-phones, Razrs, Blackberries, Droids and iPhones – our own personal number is around 10 we guess.2 One of the many problems with our rock and roll mobile-device lifestyle…
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