AMONG the many interesting observations this week at the Planet xMap symposium in Monaco was discussion of an industry trend by Tim Dehne, VP marketing for sponsoring company Luminex. The company’s microbead-based assays are being exploited in many new and…
Category: weekly news
weekly news: Hygiene becomes fashionable again
SCIENTIFIC fact is nothing more than this year’s best guess, as the latest published research continually demonstrates. But there is always a little sadness when the fact that is being overturned is one that we hold dear, for reinforcing our…
Weekly news: Strange lights in the sky
AN INTRIGUING aerial phenomenon last week gave a good indication of the poor standard of science knowledge among broadcast news crews. Late on Friday night, a strange fireball soared across the skies of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. It wasn’t…
Weekly news: Statisticians cannot count shock!
IT’S BEEN quite a summer for science, what with the arrival of a six-wheeled, nuclear-powered, laser armed robotic laboratory on Mars and the ‘revelation’ from the Encode Project that the large sections of the human genome previously dismissed as ‘junk…
Weekly news: Curiosity is a lost opportunity
IT’S all eyes on the skies next week as the most promising laboratory of recent years finally gets commissioned. This particular installation has it all: state-of-the-art instruments, a clearly defined task in a field that is still substantially unstudied, and…
Weekly news: statistics predicts London medal tally
EVEN an avowed sports philistine like myself cannot help but notice that there is a significant gathering of athletes taking place in London over the next few weeks. The fittest and strongest young men and women from around the world…
Weekly news: biology beats electronics in data density
I got to thinking about data storage density the other day, when an old floppy disk was found at the back of a drawer. It wasn’t quite a ‘what’s that Daddy?’ moment, but almost. The first computer I ever touched…
Weekly news: beam me up, Geordie
IT’S ALWAYS intriguing when science fiction becomes science fact, and never more so than when an item of kit from Star Trek gets made real. Fans of the series will recall that the apparently insurmountable problem of communications with alien…
Weekly news: if it quarks like a duck…
IT WAS one of the most anticipated announcements about one of the worst-kept secrets in science, and it dealt with discoveries that few of us genuinely understand. Screeds have already been written about the news of the new boson –…
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…