There is a great video here

This really seems like a great and straight forward way to play around with concepts of physics in a game-like manner.

You can download it at
http://www.acc.umu.se/~emilk/

Hope you enjoy this!

It was one of those great days where it was the most exciting thing to be a research scientist. John could sense this nervous feeling in his stomach, a slight tickling sensation. He was close now, really close, and if everything was to go well, then he would have an even better day tomorrow. He could already see himself, sitting in his supervisor’s office with all the other PhD-students and postdocs around him when he would present his data – data that would change everything.

It describes how the advertising industry twists and turns science to promote their product. Throw in the names of a few Hollywood-hotties and you got a perfect mix.

You should check it out .

On my way to work this morning, I saw the advertising space on the train plastered with new political party advertising. Here in Norway election day is coming closer and political advertising is popping up all over the place. So nothing new there.

BUT: The slogan on the train this morning said: “If you are sick and tired of the bad weather, vote for us!” And then underneath: “We take the protection of the environment serious!”

What a load of ….

Ok, we had a pretty lousy summer here in Norway, so I guess mentioning the weather is a good way to draw the attention of the public. And yes, global warming is likely to lead to some drastic weather changes. It is also clear, that human activity is the critical factor in global warming.
However, global warming is a long term phenomenon and political change is important, but it is unlikely that any kind of action is going to show short term effects.

By using an advert like this, politicians are suggesting that global warming (and its consequences) is a problem that can be fixed quickly. They couldn’t be further from the truth! So people will vote, because they want to save the environment; they will continue to drive their big 4-wheel drives to the corner store and will fly to all corners of the earth for a two-day-get-away, because after all, they voted to save the environment.

Then, 4 years later, global warming is still happening, the summers were bad again, and petrol got even more expensive! We really shouldn’t vote for these guys again, all they made was empty promises!

But when is a n=3 a n=3. Of course, one has to repeat the same experiment three times – independently (triplicates don’t count!!!).

The question is however, what do you do with the experiments that didn’t work. Let’s propose you design a critical experiment that you hope will support your hypothesis. You do the experiment three times, the first time you get really nice results and your findings are exactly what you expected. When you repeat the experiment the next day, you are surprised, because nothing happened. Oh well, you probably were tired, or the lab was too warm, or it was too noisy that day, or you must have made some tiny error somewhere along the way. No problem, just do it again. And so you repeat it a third time and to add to your frustration, the results are the opposite to what you found the first time – totally contradictory to your hypothesis.

You go, present the data to your supervisor and you are told to do it again. Of course! So you repeat the experiment a forth, fifth, sixth time. The results are still variable, but you also manage to repeat the results from the first experiment a couple of times.
Finally! The solution is clear. You have a n=3 that shows nicely what you set out to prove, but what to do with all the other experiments and all that contradictory data in your lab book. Well, something must have gone wrong, you were probably tired, had too much to drink the day before, the chemicals were old, the lab was too warm, or you must have forgotten some reaction steps all together.

N=3 is n=3, so lets draw up a nice, shiny figure and submit the sucker! It took long enough!

The big question that remains: How do you know something went wrong?

I believe that this is common practice in all labs and that there is a humongous collection of unsuitable results that will be forgotten. Only the published truth remains!

Of course I felt bad! I had spent a lot of time reading these papers (not all of them I guess, but at least the abstracts of all) and collecting them, and now I just threw them out, like nothing. Also, the environmental issue connected to this!!! (See Anna Kushnir’s blog on the issue of science and the environment) I guess there is not much difference if I keep them on my shelves or if I throw them out, but it feels different. During all of this it came to me, that there must be many people in science who have accumulated very large amounts of printed papers, that either lie around in offices in large white paper piles, or are stacked away in some filing cabinets or folders, never to be looked at again, because pretty much all recent papers are three mouse clicks away.

I was just wondering if there are more people out there that haven’t looked at their hard copy papers in years and wondered what to do with their paper collections.

So, where is your mountain of paper hiding?

The cell, whether single bacterium, virus, or mammalian cell, is a fascinating and complex universe. Since the discovery of the cell hundreds of years ago, we have tried to understand how a tiny thing like that can function in so many wonderful ways and create so many colourful structures. Over the years, a mountain of research documents the discovery of individual cell compartments, then individual proteins and DNA, then complex mechanisms to express proteins from DNA, then individual signalling pathways, then posttranslational modifications of individual proteins, then even more posttranslational variations, then compartmentalised signalosomes, and so on and so on. The striking thing is that every time we dive deeper into the workings of the cell, we think we discovered the key to understanding what is necessary to make a cell work. But every time we get disappointed and we continue the search for even more detailed and previously undefined principles to make sense of what really goes on inside the trillions of cells of our bodies.

On this topic I just came across a funny story from “good-old” England. There, a couple (both 84 years old!!!) has been going to the same McDonalds restaurant every day for 17 years! They always have the same meal, always sit at the same table, and are believed to have spent a total of £20,000.00 on burgers and fries. But, not too many fries, they always share a portion of the “could-be-potato” sticks. Who says love doesn’t go through the stomach?!

Amazingly, they don’t seem to be overweight or suffer from any obvious complications and all of that at the age of 84.

This story should not encourage people to eat more McDonalds food though, but I thought the story was a funny read and I thought I’d share it.

Let’s assume the above statement holds some truth and that if you believe in something very strongly and that if you focus on specific things, your brain subconsciously picks up all sorts of clues from your surroundings and helps you achieve your goals.

Let’s propose you want to buy a new car. You go to the dealership and you fall in love with a yellow VW Golf, but you don’t have the money right now to buy it, so you leave empty handed and decide to start saving for this super hot yellow Golf. From the moment you leave the shop, all you see is yellow Golfs everywhere. On the parking lots, on the roads, in back yards – everywhere. Why? They weren’t there before!
Yes, they were, you just didn’t notice them. Now that your subconscious helps you focus on them, you notice them everywhere.

In connection to this little trick that our subconscious plays on us, I have been wondering about something.

A lab scientist spends hours, days, weeks, and months reading and studying one very specific topic and looks for a solution to a clearly defined problem. In most cases, the scientist has a clear hypothesis as to what the solution could (should) be and what the results to individual experiments should look like. If this every day routine is not priming a scientists mind to seek the desired solutions, then what is? These thoughts and plans are not the slow beginnings of scientific misconduct – they are every day lab-reality! As a result, many lab scientists become obsessed with the expected outcomes of results. “I am doing this experiment to demonstrate that!” Instead of: “I am doing this experiment to see if my idea is correct.”

If lab scientists are trying so hard to support their starting hypotheses, what kind of tricks is their subconscious playing on them then? Can scientists still carry out valid experiments, or does the subconscious of the scientist make the experiment succeed?

Appear certain aspects of the result data more obvious to the scientist, because the subconsciousness of the scientist is pointing them out? Just like all the yellow Golfs that suddenly appeared! And does the scientist then subconsciously pick selected parts of the data that support their hypothesis and neglect other results?
Unfortunately it is a fact of scientific publishing, that scientists never publish ALL their results, but only the data that supports their story.
I am not suggesting that scientist manipulate their data intentionally! Naturally there are also some individuals in the science community who manipulate their data on purpose, but I am not referring to those cases here.

I am raising the question, whether scientists can control that subconscious desire to find supporting data for their hypotheses?

Regardless of whether the answer to the above question is “Yes” or “No”, there is probably not much scientist can do about it…

…it was just a thought…from the subconscious.

I wanted to raise a topic which keeps creeping up again and again, but very little seems to be done about. The problem is the non-existent communication between the science community and the general public. Yes, I know, you will say that a lot is written about science and scientific discoveries in daily newspapers and such, or that a lot is reported on TV. True enough, but my problem is not science’s exposure in the available media. The problem I am referring to is that even in the broad media science is not able to describe concepts and use words that non-scientists will understand. Or even worse – the commentary, article, or interviewer on TV will use totally inaccurate terms and descriptions.

I listened to a conversation between two well educated people the other day.
Person 1: “I don’t think I should go to the gym anymore, my doctor said I have low haemoglobin levels.”
Person 2: “Yes, haemoglobin, that’s a type of bacteria and that is really not good for you. You shouldn’t work out!”
Person 1: “No, haemoglobin is a blood parasite. I must be sick, so I shouldn’t go to the gym.”

The problem is, that these people are more than intelligent enough to understand the underlying principle, just nobody explained it to them in a way that non-scientist can understand it. Of course there are further reaching consequences that have exactly the same cause: The ongoing war between evolutionary theorists and creationists for example. I know, religion plays a role in that too, but if the science community made a stand and explained its findings in an understandable manner, then the creationists would have a hard time recruiting new followers. Instead, their support grows and grows. And what do scientists do about it? Some try to explain, but nobody understands – the rest does nothing. Scientists tend to sit on their high horse, lean back and say: “Isn’t it obvious, the facts are right there and data don’t lie!”

So, my point is that I think that there is a great opportunity for many young (and old of course) scientist to develop a great new career in science writing. Not in scientific science writing – but in public science writing. People who have the ability to explain complicated things in simple terms have a great chance to find a lot of interested people who want to read their stuff. Because the problem is not that people are not interested, they just get bored or frustrated after the 10th word they have never heard before…