I’m a girl that likes to know what she’s looking at. I have a degree in biology, and I’ve spent the past few summers exploring Eastern North America, learning about the wildlife there. Those trips left me with an urge to identify every interesting plant, animal, or mineral I see, so that I can play the role of Madame Know-it-all the next time I see it. When I’m on a hike, I want easy access to a field guide, or better yet, an expert naturalist—that way I don’t have to remember how to use those complicated identification keys in field…
The Science Creative Quarterly
From December, 2005
PHYSICS ENVY AMONG BIOLOGISTS: FACT OR FICTION?
Physicists often state their belief that all biologists would rather be physicists, but became biologists only because they were not very good at math. As evidence for this, they point to such findings as the fact that the vast majority of published studies in virology, cell biology, endocrinology, and even microbiology, use few if any partial differential equations or elements of number theory, and only one paper written by a biologist in the past 25 years (in the field of neurophysiology) has ever used tensor calculus. On the surface, this would seem to be a damning indictment of biology. Why,…
A MANIFESTO
I am going to take Science to the people. I will start small with curbside lectures on botany and bus-based displays of electromagnetism, before moving indoors to synthesize acetaminophen in a local Starbucks – perhaps lead a roundtable discussion on nanotechnology in a booth at the back of T.G.I Fridays. The science elite won’t appreciate my de-mystification of their beloved theories and the bourgeoisie, with their fancy pants and complicated shoes, will riot out of sheer terror. But the people will rejoice, for within them all are weak legged, bespectacled science geeks with no aptitude for sports who yearn for…
THE BIOTECH GAME OF LIFE
In “The Biotech Game of Life,” which is similar to the Game of Life, each player is a scientist attempting to successfully bring his or her biotechnology product to the market. During the game, players will face many obstacles before obtaining a successful product and the first one to accomplish this wins. Below are the instructions, which provides more details on the game, and links to the game board and play money (pdf files). Note, that like the real thing, it is quite challenging to finish the game. – – – Gameboard (312K) $10,000 bills (916K) | $100,000 bills (767K)…
RESEARCH FRAUD: TRUST AND MONEY
Scientific research is a process that requires scientists to perform, interpret, and communicate results in an unbiased manner, which excludes any thoughts of self-interest. This is the researcher’s responsibility to their peers and society at large, which is rewarded by trust and an atmosphere of freedom in research with little interfering regulation. However, cases of research fraud undermine this trust, and may lead to the institution of overbearing policies that restrict the freedom researchers have enjoyed. This scenario may be closer to reality than one would think due to a number of relatively recent and highly publicized cases of research…
HELP, I NEED A VACCINE! (OR H.I.V. FOR SHORT)
Andrina Simengwa, like any ordinary 23-year old basketball fan, loves to watch Vince Carter soar into the air, rotate 360º, and thunderously dunk a basketball into the hoop. Andrina, however, is in fact an extraordinary individual who leads an anything but ordinary life. She resides in the town of Lilongwe in the sub-Saharan African nation of Malawi, and is presently employed by the United Nations Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (herein referred to simply as the Global Fund). As an advocate with the Global Fund, she recently spent a few months in Canada promoting youth awareness about…
AM I EVERYWHERE?
Last year, I had a decidedly Jungian experience, which is odd for me as a rational scientific sort. This synchronicity event happened at a local bookstore where I was searching for an issue of a Canadian magazine called Maisonneuve, a publication nice enough to print an essay of mine. As I was looking over the rack, my eyes wandered and noticed an issue of The Believer1 , where lo and behold, I saw my name on the front cover – a very observable and clear “by DAVID NG”, written with agreeable font, and even flanked by two pretty star icons.…
A CHEMIST RESPONDS TO “A SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT.”
(A review and/or rebuttal to “A Scientific Experiment” by Jaime J. Weinman, Issue One, Part II) Well, it’s a good thing that science experiments on webpages aren’t subject to the traditional anonymous peer review process. It they were, Jaime would probably get a reply something like this: “Dear Mr. Weinman, “We regret that we cannot accept your manuscript for publication in its current, or likely any, form. The reviewers have pointed out a number of glaring deficiencies and omissions, briefly summarized below. “Although your scientific curiosity is to be applauded, your experimental methodology seems exceedingly limited, and lacks many important…
A SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENT
Some other people were talking about the silliest things they’d ever done. Their examples beat my own, but then, they’d done more things than I had, silly or no. The one really silly thing I’d done that they hadn’t was — and I swear this is true — I once tried to see if it was possible to cook all the fat out of a hot dog. I’m quite serious about this, though, as you can imagine, it happened on a day when I was really, really bored. I had eaten a hot dog for lunch, and I was wondering,…