I was going to title this post ‘How the Internet Is Facilitating Public Participation in Scientific Research’ but I decided the above was more catchy. Over the last week, I’ve come across a couple new ‘science experiments’ – that is, experiments in improving science by encouraging the involvement of the online public. The first one, [...]
The other day I was cutting up cauliflower for soup. It looked rather a lot like this: I turned to the other people in the room and said, “Look it’s a brain! A braaaaaaain!” I was thinking specifically of the cerebellum which, when cut sagittally, looks like this: Of course, what both a cauliflower and [...]
I love making cakes, especially for friends’ birthdays. Yesterday was my housemate Mitchell’s birthday, and he requested a carrot cake but did not specify a shape. Given his recently acquired but ardent love for sea slugs, I decided to make him a sea slug cake: Turns out sea slugs (and related sea creatures) are frequently [...]
Too Hard for Science? is a series on a Scientific American blog asking researchers what experiments they would do if money, ethics, or the laws of the universe weren’t an issue. I think the idea for the series is brilliant, although somewhat disappointingly executed – the articles are all way too short, and some of [...]
There’s another article out this month on all the false positives being published in psychology [pdf]. It deals with what the authors call “researcher degrees of freedom” – a series of somewhat arbitrary decisions about experimental design and data analysis that researchers have to make over the course of their study. Because researchers are a) [...]
