Rosanne's Lounge » science

The things you miss out on!

admin — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 19:06:00 +0000

This one is mainly for

and

: there’s a giant squid being dissected at the Melbourne Museum for the public right now. I’m about 10 minutes away and I think by the time I get there it’ll be over but you can watch it at The Age’s video feed…

Ugliness as it relates to home environment

admin — Tue, 30 May 2006 08:00:00 +0000

I find this really fascinating. A couple of UK studies suggest women from broken homes are ‘more masculine’ and hence ‘less attractive’ (presumably to heterosexual men).

Even more fascinating to me is that the ‘ugliest’ girls were those whose parents stayed together but had a poor relationship.

I remember reading in a book my mother gave me as a teenager, Families and how to survive them, that we rate others as attractive based on shared emotional history as we can see muscle and patterns from experience in faces. Couldn’t attractiveness from broken homed people also simply be a subconscious processing of the emotional pain in their histories? The question for me is why that gets rated as ‘masculine’ in women and what it looks like in men…

Tingles down my spine

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 19:36:00 +0000

Having recently read a bit of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle, I got chills reading that a long-lost manuscript of the Royal Society’s minutes in Robert Hookes’ handwriting has been found in a cupboard in Hampshire in the UK.

The notes describe in detail some of the most astounding and outlandish scientific thinking from meetings of the society between 1661 to 1682. There is the very earliest work with microscopes, confirming the first sightings of sperm and micro-organisms. There is correspondence with Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren over the nature of gravity, with the latter’s proposal to fire bullets into the air to see where they might drop. And there is a page that lays to rest the bitter controversy over who designed the watch that would eventually lead to the first measurements of longitude.

How cool is that?

Busted

admin — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:13:00 +0000

Well, that’s better. Bush’s man in NASA just got sacked due to a false CV. He didn’t get far or do too much damage and the press office has been told off for trying to alter scientific findings rather than just arrange media access to them. Maybe there is hope after all!