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http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/ - My small attempt to celebrate science and to make it interesting and fun by giving jargon, confusion and elitism a solid beating with the stick of good writing.
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If I say the phrases 'anti-ageing' and 'nutritional balance' to you, you'd probably think of the pages of quack websites selling untested supplements than the pages of Nature . And yet this week's issue has a study that actually looks at these issues with scientific rigour. It shows that, at ...
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Oscar Wilde once said, "One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation." All well and witty, but for those of us who aren't Victorian cads, reputation matters. It's the bedrock that our social lives are built upon and people go to great ...
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For many religious people, the popular question " What would Jesus do ?" is essentially the same as "What would I do?" That's the message from an intriguing and controversial new study by Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago. Through a combination of surveys, psychological ...
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This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most common developmental disorder in children, affecting anywhere between 3-5% of the world's school-going population. As the name suggests, kids with ...
Physical Science
Ah, penguins. You just can't help but smile. These animals are found on Boulders Beach near Cape Town, where they come so close to the erected walkways that you could potentially reach out and grab one (if the mood took you and you were an idiot).
The African penguin (Spheniscus demersus) ...
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The hammerhead shark's head is one of the strangest in the animal world. The flattened hammer, known as a 'cephalofoil', looks plain bizarre on the face of an otherwise streamlined fish, and its purpose is still the subject of debate. Is it an organic metal detector that allows the shark to ...
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I have now written 600 posts for this blog (give or take a few - I think the "hearing with skin" story was 601).
The next lot of 100 posts will start tomorrow but for the moment, a brief interlude and over to you. Say whatever you'd like - about this blog, about science, about journalism, ...
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What part of the body do you listen with? The ear is the obvious answer, but it's only part of the story - your skin is also involved. When we listen to someone else speaking, our brain combines the sounds that our ears pick up with the sight of the speaker's lips and face, and subtle changes ...
Physical Science
The role of Velociraptor's infamous claw has received much attention from scientists ever since they clicked their way across a movie kitchen. In comparison, the formidable claws of living raptors (birds of prey) have received little attention. Eagles, hawks, falcons and owls are some of ...
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For the pipefish (and their relatives, seahorses and sea dragons), it's the males who get pregnant. After a male fertilises the female's eggs, he takes them up into a special brood pouch and shelters them until the babies hatch from his pot-bellied stomach several weeks later. He may ...
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Many thanks to the kind folks at PCMag for including me on their list of Top 50 blogs of 2009 . However, they appear to have made a teensy little typo, where they've misspelled my name as "Patrick Jordan". Easy enough a mistake, I guess - at least the letters D, O and N are shared...
Read ...
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In the early days of the last US elections, Hillary Clinton's campaign was accused of deliberately darkening Barack Obama's skin in a TV ad. The implication was that by highlighting Obama's "blackness", Clinton's camp was trying to exploit negative associations that voters might have with ...
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Barack Obama
Of all of South Africa's species of antelope, the kudu is my favourite, mainly because of those elegantly spiralling horns. They adorn the logo of the national parks and several street signs (which promise kudus majestically leaping out across highways, but seldom deliver). And ...
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Hardly a natural history documentary goes by without some mention of leafcutter ants . So overexposed are these critters that I strongly suspect they're holding David Attenborough's relatives to ransom somewhere. But there is good reason for their fame - these charismatic insects are ...
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In my final year of university, with exam deadlines looming and time increasingly fleeting, I considered recording some of my notes and playing them over while I was asleep. The concept of effectively gaining 6 extra hours of revision was appealing, but the idea didn't stick - it took too long ...
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Around 15,000 years ago, North American was home to a wide menagerie of giant mammals - mammoths and mastodons , giant ground sloths , camels , short-faced bears , American lions , dire wolves , and more. But by 10,000 years ago, these "megafauna" had been wiped out. ...
Physical Science
News journalism relies on a tried-and-tested model of inverted storytelling. Contrary to the introduction-middle-end style of writing that pervades school essays and scientific papers, most news stories shove all the key facts into the first paragraphs, leaving the rest of the prose to present ...
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At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to ...
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Hi folks,
A couple of housekeeping issues:
ScienceBlogs have developed a set of funky widgets that allow you to share the headlines from your favourite blogs on other websites. You can find the one for Not Exactly Rocket Science here - just click Share , and then Install outside ...
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As a species, we hate cheaters. Just last month, I blogged about our innate desire to punish unfair play but it's a sad fact that cheaters are universal. Any attempt to cooperate for a common good creates windows of opportunity for slackers. Even bacteria colonies have their own layabouts. ...
