IN AN apparently accidental leak on the Cern website, the discovery of a new boson has been revealed. The scientific community is widely expecting an announcement of the discovery of the Higgs boson, sometimes referred to as the God particle,…
Tag: LabHomepage
Weekly news: Campaign backfire may have been intentional
NOW, call me cynical if you like, but I can’t help wondering if the unmitigated disaster that was this week’s launch of a campaign to motivate young women into science might have been what was actually wanted? You’ve doubtless heard…
Weekly news: lab freezer failure is reminder to us all
MODERN laboratory equipment is, on the whole, so well designed and engineered that we might take its performance for granted. Instruments have developed to the point where they offer better resolution and better reliability than ever before, provided they are…
Weekly news: a muppet of beakers and a skittle of Erlenmeyers
NEVER let it be said that we don’t like to have a little fun from time to time, here at the LabHomepage. This week we found ourselves hijacking our own Twitter feed when a casual remark about collective nouns took…
Lab kit collective nouns: the definitive collection
IT STARTED with an idle thought about what might be an appropriate collective noun for mass spectrometers, sparked by the announcement of another two new models from AB Sciex (as reported here). In the same way as we speak of…
Invisibility cloak promises spectroscopy on a chip (video)
WHILE the general media are agitated by the far-fetched possibilities of Harry Potteresque camouflage from today’s announcement of a so-called invisibility cloak, here at the LabHomepage we’re much more excited about the prospects for massively-multiplexed spectroscopy on a single chip…
Weekly news: In praise of the table-top show, plus free pipettes offer
IT’S all about pipettes this week. Well, not all about them, but these workhorses of the laboratory have been figuring strongly in my consciousness. One reason is that one of the early supporters of LabHomepage, Porvair Sciences, is making a…
Exploring particle physics through the medium of interpretive dance
THIS is one of those stories that makes you check the date on the press release, just in case it’s a spoof. As unlikely as it seems, though, this one is real: CERN, the European central laboratory for particle physics,…
Weekly news: Most scientific research is wrong
SCIENCE is an iterative process, a steady march away from ignorance and towards enlightenment, a gradual unveiling of the hidden truth of why things are the way they are. There are some mistakes along the way, and a lot of…
Encyclopedia of Life passes half-way point: one million species down, one million to go
A RECENT surge in content from the Smithsonian Institution has seen the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) break through the one million page milestone and sets it firmly on course to catalogue every known species on Earth. Established in 2007 with…