An episode of the BBC program Horizon on 'Big Data' recently caught my attention. The content was a fascinating insight into how we are living in a data-rich age and how trawling/mining/dredging such data has the ability to advance medicine, predict crime and even make someone a few quid/dollars/euros on the stock market.Gone (data) fishing @ Wikipedia  I'm a big believer in big data. In particular how, with the right sources, technology, techniques and people, big data might be able […]

Imagine you are the driver & your chocolate cravings are unruly passengers If someone gave you a bag of 14 chocolates to carry around for five days, would you be able to resist eating them and any other chocolate? That was challenge faced by 135 undergrads in a new study that compared the effectiveness of two different "mindfulness" resistance techniques. To help them, Kim Jenkins and Katy Tapper taught 45 of their participants "cognitive diffusion", the essence being that "you are not […]

Before she enters the cleanroom, Marie pins her protocol for the day and a list of her samples to the window between corridor and lab. From the outside. You can barely see through the screen. Although not very old, it is almost opaque with a yellowish haze, and the entire lab looks somewhat disheveled. Not what you would expect from the cleanest room in town. But to keep the room this clean, as free from any modern DNA as possible... Read more

After our Consensus paper was published with extensive media coverage, law professor and climate communicator Dan Kahan posted an emotive blog post (he characterised it as a "haughty outburst"). He questioned the value of a study measuring consensus and whether consensus is something climate communicators should be emphasising. Once Dan had a chance to calm down, we corresponded about his post and he suggested he summarise his views in a 4-point article that I could respond to. Dan's 4 point […]

All the fireflies, which I caught here, belonged to the Lampyridae (in which family the English glowworm is included), and the greater number of specimens were of Lampyris occidentalis. I found that this insect emitted the most brilliant flashes when irritated: in the intervals, the abdominal rings were obscured. The flash was almost co-instantaneous in the two rings, but it was just perceptible first in the anterior one. The shining matter was fluid and very adhesive: little spots, where […]