Category: science
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Where Science Meets Magic: A Book List
I wrote about blending hard science with fantasy today over at Mad Genius Club, and then, as I usually do, I decided to make up a list of books that do that blend and handle it well. Not necessarily Science Fantasy, which is a genre where the science is so advanced it is indistinguishable from…
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Drosophilia
From lab experiment to artwork: the journey of a humble fruit fly. Today in our last hands-on molecular techniques lab, we were counting flies. But first, we put them to sleep. Not permanently! No, we knocked them out (eventually. Perky little buggers) with an odd-smelling FlyNap, and then we tipped them onto paper and counted…
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A Broken Tulip
As I was making my way through my day, I stole a moment to smell the roses – not literally, they aren’t yet blooming – and I photographed tulips. There are a handful in glorious bloom on my campus, and I felt a bit conspicuous as I made my way through the grass to take…
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Forensic Toxicology: Poisons, Drugs, Scientific Analysis, and the Law
This is a paper I had to write for class, but it was rather an enjoyable project. I am very interested in this specialty, and it’s interesting to delve into the cases, methods, and implications of this field. If you catch a typo or find yourself confused, leave a comment. I’m turning this in…
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Eat This While You Read That: Tedd Roberts
In with the traditional novel-length writers, I’ve sprinkled a few folks who are more difficult to stuff into a pigeonhole. This man is certainly not a person you can define with a single role. Or sentence. Renowned scientist, science fiction fan, and author of short stories and numerous science articles related to science fiction topics,…
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Quantum Soup
I’ve got to run to Physiology lecture – Not sure if we’re finishing capillaries or starting on digestion – but I saw this article and was interested. Then a sentence popped out and made me laugh. But in a material containing a spin liquid state, even if that material is cooled to absolute zero, the…
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Gel Electrophoresis
Purpose: DNA is negatively charged, so when fragments of it are subjected to an electrical current, they will migrate away from the negative pole and toward the positive. This principle allows the sorting of DNA fragments by size in an agarose gel, as smaller fragments will move faster than larger ones. By using a molecular…
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Rambling in the Trees
When adding a dilutant to your coffee, you should check your cup to ensure that you have not already added your dilutant of choice. Given that this morning, mine was hot cocoa mix, I narrowly escaped death by chocolate. I’m sitting here checking my homework for two classes. In Molecular Techniques, I need to prepare…
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Sticky Notes
I don’t have the brainpower for a real blog, so instead you get to see what I’ve got stuck up as reminders for various classes and reading. Transgenic Plants The alteration of crops to improve their production was performed through the basis of selection before the creation of transgenics. This selection has been going on…
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Laboratory Instruments
I’m writing up a presentation which is intended to introduce and give an overview on the instruments we use in the analytical chemistry laboratory. What I’ve done is include the text below (the completed project is actually in poster format). If you see anything that doesn’t make sense, could you let me know in comments?…
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Caffeine in Coffee
Abstract: This report focused on the determination of the caffeine in coffee brewed at home, as analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography and calibrated against a known caffeine standard calibration curve. The coffee was determined to be 45.37 ppm, with a standard deviation of 2.493 and an RSD of 5.49 %, the ppm in…
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The Ig Nobels
Later today, the Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded, and it’s their 25th anniversary. A bizarre collection of the weird, wacky, and just plain gross scientific achievements of the year, I highly recommend that you go take a look at the winners of the past year’s prizes. I’m including the 2014 winners below to whet your appetites.…