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Scientists give bee orchid a new perfume

Scientists give bee orchid a new perfume

Rhizome has a cache of incredible 1980s-era Soviet animations of American science fiction stories. Quite fittingly for Earth Day, here is Ray Bradbury’s “Here There Be Tygers” as imagined by Russian animators. The hyper-synth music is especially awesome. неимоверно!

More wonderful animations of stories by the likes of Stephen King and Robert Silverberg can be found at Rhizome.

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Last year, Frank Swain of SciencePunk and I put a series of questions to various parties ahead of the European Election in an article that ended up creating a lot of debate, particularly in and around the Green Party.

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In which Dr Aust sets a small – though not quite homeopathically small –  test.
I had meant to post something for World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW), which was last week.
However, I got a bit distracted by other things, like the dropping of the BCA’s lawsuit against Simon Singh (including whether the BCA had been reading [...]

Simon Jenkins’ CIF article for the Guardian yesterday could easily be paraphrased as saying that the ongoing flight restrictions were “health and safety gone mad”.

Though the former Times editor dressed up the classic taxi driver’s thesis in a thick layer of dramatic cliché, it’s a lazy, sarcastic, and ill-reasoned argument, showing a deep misunderstanding of risk.

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Setting nerdy hearts a-flutter across the internet is current rumour that Zooey Deschanel will play Ada Lovelace in an upcoming film about the world’s first programmer.

Gizmodo has the scoop:

The casting of Zooey Deschanel isn’t completely confirmed, with Production Weekly tweeting she’s “in talks to play Ada Lovelace in “Enchantress Of Numbers,” Bruce Beresford plans to direct the period drama this fall”

Which is as good an excuse as any to take a few minutes and bask in the sublime wonder of this video:

Hat tip: @carmenego

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As well as appointing a Chief Executive who wrote for an AIDS denialist magazine, the Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health (FIH) have also come under scrutiny for alleged financial irregularities and channeling money from a disgraced politician, Dame Shirley Porter, to fund a commissioned report, the Smallwood Report.  Motivated by this I have examined the [...]

The Catholic church has not been having a good time of late.
There is the global furore over the long-standing problem of child abuse and sexual molestation of children by priests and by members of lay Catholic educational organisations.
Then there is the growing clamour about the inability of the Church hierarchy, right up to the Pope, [...]

“Jack of Kent, pleased to meet you, love your writing.”

And with that introduction, I am tossed into Nick Cohen’s wonderful and heart-warming article today, agreeably titled: “Now charlatans will know to beware the geeks”.

At least I am presented as having some social skills.

(A geek, of course, is a nerd with social skills.)

But is it correct to emphasise the role of skeptic bloggers, geeks, nerds, and the rest of the internet-based enthusiasts and Skeptics in the Pub attendees who have clamoured and campaigned over the last two years?

Well, in narrow terms, such an emphasis is incorrect.

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It really is of little consequence which party forms the next government. Of immensely greater importance are the thinking skills of the members of parliament. You might not want to vote for anyone who supported Early Day Motion 1240 supporting the homeopathic hospitals in the NHS. Supporters included such luminaries as Nick Clegg, Ian Gibson [...]

Dr Sarah Myhill is dangerously wrong on MMR Vaccination.

Menopause is still largely a taboo subject, rarely mentioned in mainstream media and then often in negative or jokey terms. It’s seen as a time of loss, of change for the worse, a decrease in femininity, the start of old age and decrepitude. Despite the best efforts of some women to promote The Change as just another life phase, a time of increasing wisdom, there is rarely anything good said about it in Western Culture, along with plenty of scare stories about HRT.

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