As translated into musical notation REFERENCE: The all pervasive principle of repetitious recurrence governs not only coding sequence construction but also human endeavor in musical composition (1986) Susumi Ohno and Midori Ohno. Immunogenetics 24:71-78 ABSTRACT: Organisms which have evolved on this earth are governed by multitudes of periodicities; tomorrow is another today, and the next year is going to be much like this year. Accordingly, the principle of repetitious recurrence pervades every aspect of life on this earth. Thus, individual genes in the genome have been duplicated and triplicated often to the point of redundancy, and each coding sequence consists…
The Science Creative Quarterly
By The Science Creative Quarterly
Castigat ridendo mores.
THE HOLIDAYS ARE NOT REALLY ABOUT SCIENCE
CHRISTMAS 1970. by Spike Milligan A little girl called Sile Javotte Said ‘Look at the lovely presents I’ve got’ While a little girl in Biafra said ‘Oh what a lovely slice of bread’. – – – – – The SCQ wishes you a Happy Holidays, and invites you to please enjoy (or re-enjoy) some of our holiday flavoured pieces. Some older favourites will begin running again on December 27th, and the new? … Well, the new will return in the New Year on January 8th. It’s a Wonderful Lab (by Vince LiCata) T’was the Night ‘Fore the Conference (A Visit…
A FABRICATED PAPER: DORIAN GRAY MICE – ON IMMORTAL MICE
(This paper was presented as an April Fools Joke in Nature, 1993) TITLE: Dorian Gray Mice (by Robin A. Weiss) FIRST PARAGRAPH Newly generated transgenic mice appear to be able to grow indefinitely without ageing, yet with programmed death. This dramatic developmet is the work of several groups, and has been accomplished in three stages… (download pdf of paper here)
HAIKU (AGAIN)
We have been getting some lovely haikus for our phylogeny project, and hope to continue getting more (need a good large data set to make this phylohaiku tree impressive looking). Anyway, here are some that work: THE NAIADS bottom of a row- boat, in a pool of rainwater, the mayflies orgy ~Nathan Smith BABY PENGUIN Warmed against the wind by the sky-grey coat of fur later shed and smoothed ~Robert Isenberg See insectica Seven Lepidopterae Spotted Danaidae ~Nan Spiers SPIDER Eight legs pirouette Spinning a muted music: Arachnid ballet. ~George Motisher A raucous gray wedge, Purposeful, splits the pale sky.…
PAPAVER ARGEMONE
Original book source: Prof. Dr. Otto Wilhelm Thomé Flora von Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz 1885, Gera, Germany (see link for further details on image)
JOURNAL CLUB FIND: SEXUAL ORIENTATION? LET’S LOOK AT YOUR FINGERS.
(Click on reference to see pdf of first page) REFERENCE: Finger-length ratios and sexual orientation. (2000) Nature 404: pp455-456 FIRST PARAGRAPH: Animal models have indicated that androgenic steroids acting before birth might influence the sexual orientation of adult humans. Here we examine the androgen-sensitive pattern of finger lengths, and find evidence that homosexual women are exposed to more prenatal androgen than heterosexual women are; also, men with more than one older brother, who are more likely than first-born males to be homosexual in adulthood, are exposed to more prenatal androgen than eldest sons. Prenatal androgens may therefore influence adult human…
INTRODUCING OUR “FILTER”
“FILTER” The name says it all really. The Science Creative Quarterly is, at the heart of it all, a project aimed at getting folks to talk a little more science. And if we were to expand this further, it is to get non-science folks to play a little as well. This, we’ve been doing in a pseudo literary sort of way with the SCQ, and we hope also in a reasonably successful sort of way. But quite often, with respect to our roles as teachers and communications, we find something that let’s us talk science a little easier. And these…
A WRITING CONTEST THAT CONCERNS IMAGES CHOSEN BY OUR SCIENCE WRITERS, AS WELL AS SOME MATHEMATICAL NOTATION
PDF | JPG The Science Creative Quarterly seeks science humour pieces for entry into our awesome new contest. Judging will be based on a number of criteria that can be annotated as follows: Briefly, final Score (FS) is equal to the the base score of the humour piece submitted (S), times a number (n) of modifiers (fs) which are dependant on captions provided, and their humour level. Note that captions may be submitted separately even at multiple dates after initial humour submission. Number of captions provided by author is flexible but can be no more than 1 for each image…
THIS IMPORTANT MESSAGE IS ABOUT HOUSEKEEPING AND ALSO AN EXCUSE TO SAY “PUNCH IT CHEWIE!”
Dear reader, It goes without saying that we assume that not one of our readers read all 80 or so of the textbook pieces that graced the SCQ’s pages over the summer months. That would be too much – even for us stalwart editor types who know a thing or two about science. Because of this, we are absolutely sure that people will be tickled pink to hear that year two officially begins on September 5th. That’s right – in less than a week, the SCQ will go back to the eccentric mixture of material that made it so loved…