By the grace of all that is good about science

Science: it's awesome, especially during the holidays.

SCIENCEGEEK ADVENT CALENDAR EXTRAVAGANZA! (DAY 15)

GEEKY LABORATORY CHRISTMAS PLAYS (Collected works by Vince Li-Cata) IT’S A DEBATABLE CHRISTMAS Hello, Hello Everyone, and welcome to the Special Christmas Edition of The Sean Connery Show.  I’m your host.  You know, of course, me as the star of Zardoz and Dragonheart, but my friends just call me Sir Sean Connery.  Thank you, thank you – please hold your applause. On today’s Special Christmas Edition of The Sean Connery Show we have a real treat for you Yanks…it’s the First Ever U.S. Public Debate Among Candidates for the Next Director of the National Institutes of Health.  Please hold your applause. Now many…

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SCIENCEGEEK ADVENT CALENDAR EXTRAVAGANZA! (DAY 14)

DARWIN AS SANTA (a.k.a. one way Darwin Could Jump the Shark) “Sporting his full white beard, Darwin is hired to impersonate Santa Claus at the local mall. He initially does well in this job, looking the part, being punctual, amicable, and knowledgeable about reindeer. However, he soon begins to insist on teaching children words like “invertebrate.” He also starts giving out stylish feces beads instead of candy canes. Later, he gets in an argument with another Santa Claus in another mall over biologically sound explanations for Rudolph’s glowing nose. The “Darwin vs. Santa Claus” fistfight goes viral on YouTube.” By…

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SCIENCEGEEK ADVENT CALENDAR EXTRAVAGANZA! (DAY 13)

IMAGES IN CHRISTMAS BALLS: A.K.A. CRAZY OPTICS CALCULATIONS (By Eef van Beveren, Frieder Kleefeld, George Rupp | pdf) Figure 6: The locations of the various images as seen by each of the five observers introduced in Fig. 1. We also indicate the angles of incidence and reflection, in order to make sure that they are equal. Abstract: We describe light-reflection properties of spherically curved mirrors, like balls in the Christmas tree. In particular, we study the position of the image which is formed somewhere beyond the surface of a spherical mirror, when an eye observes the image of a pointlike light source. The…

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SCIENCEGEEK ADVENT CALENDAR EXTRAVAGANZA! (DAY 12)

An Administrative Approach from Santa Claus and Stork (JE May; CR Ribeiro; F Belini) Abstract: As a public domain, the Santa Claus is able to deliver in a single night million of products in different places in the entire world. On the other hand, the Stork also deliver a million of products a day but the delivery time can achieve nine months. In this work, it is discussed several considerations concerning these two characters of the word folklore, Santa Claus and Stork, trough the theoretical concepts of the administration, human resources, production and logistic. This work intends to facilitate the…

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SCIENCEGEEK ADVENT CALENDAR EXTRAVAGANZA! (DAY 10)

PRETTIEST CHRISTMAS LIGHTS EVER (Animated gifs of epithelial cells doing the mitosis) Just staring at this makes us think about the brilliance of nature. Just consider the complexity of what’s going on during mitosis – you have a genome, compartmentalized with chromosomes, doubling. Then, you have a perfect splitting of the two copies into two separate cells! That’s like having a group of people in a room, then somehow making copies of all of them, and then getting them to split perfectly into two groups, so that one set of them can move (in an orderly fashion) to another room…

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SCIENCEGEEK ADVENT CALENDAR EXTRAVAGANZA! (DAY 9)

AWESOME MICROBIAL CHRISTMAS ART!  Fungal plates by Stephanie Mounaud: Bacterial plates by Niall Hamilton. Fungal Christmas tree. Top: Talaromyces stipitatus; Tree: Aspergillus nidulans; Ornaments: Penicillium marneffei; Trunk: Aspergillus terreus. – – – – – – – – – Fungal snowman. Hat, Eyes, Mouth, Buttons: Aspergillus niger; Arms: Aspergillus nidulans; Nose: Aspergillus terreus with Penicillium marneffei; Body: Neosartorya (See previous day)

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