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…

We thought perhaps (especially for those of you who are globally inclined) that you might enjoy a little writing contest we have going over at our sister site, Terry. Prizes consist of our bookstore’s gift cards which are usable even for those of you who are not local (via their website). $1500 in total, and an opportunity to present material in a variety of forms – take a gander at the rules below, presented, of course, in limerick form PDF | JPG There once was a website named Terry1 That wanted to make people wary Of things going on In…

“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…

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…

Over at the World’s Fair, we started on a little blogging experiment. It is sort of a blogging carnival, but one that revolves around a mystery. In any event, all clues for the first puzzle are now available, and we would like the Science Creative Quarterly readers to partake. We’ll leave this up for a week or so, but here is the last entry reprinted below: “Here presented is the final clue in our little experiment. It being the start of a story, a novel to be precise. In fact, we’re getting tingles just thinking how lovely it all comes…

The World’s Fair is a new blog by David Ng (editor of the SCQ), and Benjamin Cohen (McSweeney’s Annals of Science). Here are the two of them talking about it: DN: Hey, my name is Dave Ng. BRC: I’m Benjamin Cohen. Dave, what’s your story? You’re Canadian right? So that’s this whole other thing, I take it. DN: Yes, I am Canadian, living in Vancouver actually and based at the University of British Columbia. I was born in England though, which you can sometimes hear when I talk (especially when I say the words water and four). I guess that…

Essentially, for a while, the SCQ has been interested in presenting a phylogeny related section, which would use some type of creative form as its driving force. And why not haikus (or is it Haiki?). So this is essentially a call for some Haiku’s on various organisms, preferably ones that work in the phylogenetic context. Can you imagine it? A phylogenetic database derived solely from 5,7,5 syllabus prose. Should be quite interesting, and hopefully, we’ll be able to set something up so that Haiku submissions can be dynamic (i.e. real time). Anyway, to get your creative juices rolling, here is…

Want to expand a genome? Previous thinking suggests you only need some transposable elements, often nicknamed “jumping genes”, to repeatedly, and irreversibly, insert into the genome. Time will take care of the rest. However, new research is now challenging this view by revealing that transposable elements can also be deleted during evolution. The new findings were recently reported by Louie van de Lagemaat, Dixie Mager and their colleagues from the Terry Fox Laboratory in Vancouver, BC. They compared the human, chimpanzee and Rhesus monkey genomes and found 37 instances where transposable elements were present in the primitive Rhesus monkey, but…

For mammals in the northern regions of the world, global warming must seem a little more real than it does to humans below the Arctic Circle. In 2004, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment released a report called Impacts of a Warming Climate that revealed dire and immediate consequences of climate change for species ranging from polar bears to seals [1]. Temperatures in the Arctic are increasing at twice the rate of the rest of the world, according to the report. Sea ice is rapidly melting and breaking up at a rate of about 3% per decade[2], winters are shortening, and…