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 […]

One of the goals of Andy Juhl’s and Craig Aumack’s Arctic research is to determine the role of ice algae as a source of nutrition for food webs existing in the water column and at the bottom of the Arctic ocean. During their fieldwork these Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory scientists are deploying a plankton net, a [...]

This is the world's silliest arduino-based electronic musical instrument. It is a mashup of the "Melody" tutorial and the "Button" tutorial.  The code I modified (see below) strips out the part where the tune is actually played and instead plays a single note when each button is pressed./* Melody * (cleft) 2005 D. Cuartielles for K3 * * This example uses a piezo speaker to play melodies. It sends * a square wave of the appropriate frequency to the piezo, generating * the corresponding […]