Here it is, Friday once again, and that means it’s time for me to roll up the sleeves of my lab coat, put all my rings and watches in the nearby nonferrous receptacle of science (an old pink washing basin, as it happens), and plunge elbow deep into the big vat o’ science I keep around for just such a purpose and fish about for some salient and savour science with which to stimulate and edutain you, my adoring masses.
Yes, that was all one sentence. I am totally cool with that.
But now you know why I never use grammar checkers. They would choke with uncomprehending rage over that stellar opening paragraph. Refusing to use them, therefore, is not merely practical and easier on my nerves, it is really the only humane option.
Software has feelings too!
First a semi-addendum : there’s a story I wanted to cover last week and never got around to, so I figure I had better tag that sucker this week before it disappears over the rapidly receding horizon of science news entirely.
This year’s Nobel prizes were particularly sweet for one man, Israel chemist Daniel Shechtman, because he has had to fight for his discovery of what are called quasicrystals for almost 30 years, and now he’s gotten a Nobel prize for them.
When he discovered them back in 1982, his colleagues all laughed at him. You can’t make a regular crystalline structure based on five sided figures! Everyone knows that. You either have an amorphous non-crystalline blob, or a simple periodical crystal. No in between.
Well, quasicrystals are in between. And he definitely had observed them. But his results were so controversial that not only did he spark heated debate throughout chemistry, but his research group eventually booted him out for making them look bad.
As if that wasn’t enough, no less a personage than legendary American chemist Linus Pauling was quoted as saying “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasiscience. ”
At this point, I feel like we should all be glad that he didn’t retreat to a remote castle and invent the Quasicrystal That Ate Desmoines.
Instead, he published anyhow, and science has slowly validated him over time, till finally, this year, he gets the Nobel.
Ah, sweet, sweet vindication. I mean seriously, has anyone else ever had a biography that more closely resembles the Mad Scientist’s? They literally laughed at him at the Institute, and he literally returned to prove to them all what myopic fools they had all been and win the Nobel Prize for his discovery.
And from my comfy perch on the sidelines, here after the game is over and the winner declared without my ever having had a preference of one team over another, I can smugly say “Gee, seems obvious to me that you can tile any regular solid with a sufficiently complex pattern”, but hey, what the hell do I know?
Just goes to show that science, being performed by humans, is fraught with pitfalls, and the revolutionaries of today will be that which must be overcome tomorrow and the embarrassing historical footnote of next week.
Moving on to science that sounds weird but apparently works, Scottish doctors are using ultrasound to help broken bones heal faster.
Yes, ultrasound sort of like the kind we now associate with taking a look at your little baby as he swims in the womb, but at a different frequency and pulse rate.
They claim that the patient feels nothing, but application of this particular kind of ultrasound for twenty minutes on a regular basis to the break can speed healing by forty percent because “The ultrasonic pulses induce cell vibration, which doctors say stimulates bone regeneration and healing”.
And so far, nobody is calling bullshit. But whenever people start talking about special vibrations that aid healing, I get nervous. It smacks of psuedoscience. Smacking of things is not, of course, an actual logical argument. But still, it sends up alarms.
Oh, and lastly, a quick word on Amazon’s supposedly $80 Kindle : in real, market terms, it does not exist, because in order to get that sweet price, you have to buy, as in pay money for, a Kindle that is loaded with advertising. No competitor of theirs forces you to accept ads, ergo, this Kindle does not compete with them.
The real version, the one sans ads, is $109, which is still a decent price, but not the “oh my god, the first under-$100 e-reader!” that the hype would tell you it is.
Once more, Amazon demonstrates their complete inability to understand how the low end works, and comes across elitist.
That said, that’s all for now. Catch you next week folks!