Jakob - Talk Science To Me

Muses: Parasite of the Day

Jakob — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 18:41:28 +0000

If you’ve read other blog posts here or followed us on Twitter, you’ve likely noticed that we kind of like parasites. A lot. And whether or not you can muster up the same fascination, it’s kind of hard to argue against their importance; roughly 40% of species on earth are parasitic, and as many as 75%… Read More »Muses: Parasite of the Day

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Treasures: Natural nuclear reactors

Jakob — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 15:45:50 +0000

I don’t know how other people are taught, but for a long time I thought that nuclear reactors generated energy through some borderline-mystical atomic process that I could never really comprehend. And that’s partly true. But if you skip the details of how fission actually works, its role in a power plant is actually pretty… Read More »Treasures: Natural nuclear reactors

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Typesetting matters

Jakob — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 21:44:11 +0000

Typesetting and layout aren’t just important to how a document looks. They can also be vital to how easy it is to read. Content creators now have many options for handling these things themselves—everything from default themes in MS Word and Pages all the way up to TeX if you’re in a scientific field. But… Read More »Typesetting matters

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Treasures: Stellar Nucleosynthesis

Jakob — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 17:25:41 +0000

Most of the things in our “Treasures” series are living organisms. I think this is partly because lots of living organisms are easy to identify with: they exist on a scale similar to ours and are easy to categorize as discrete entities. Phenomena are a little harder to sell, for the most part. Stellar nucleosynthesis has… Read More »Treasures: Stellar Nucleosynthesis

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Muses: David Ng

Jakob — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 15:31:42 +0000

Dr. David Ng is definitely our kind of person. In addition to being smart as a scientist, he’s an excellent and inventive communicator with a great instinct for creating hooks. He’s also very skilled at devising relatable premises that are truly capable of carrying a scientific discussion. I wrote a lot about this in my… Read More »Muses: David Ng

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Copyright: Quotes

Jakob — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 19:00:46 +0000

My alma mater’s policy on quotation is (loosely paraphrased): “Please for the love of all that is good and pure in the universe, properly attribute all words from external sources so that we don’t need to award you a special mega-F and chisel your academic malfeasance into your headstone.” Point being, at least in my… Read More »Copyright: Quotes

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NASA launches MAVEN, there is much rejoicing

Jakob — Tue, 19 Nov 2013 23:18:28 +0000

We’re talking about water on Mars! Again! I think even hardcore Mars nuts might be getting tired of this, which is kind of a shame because it is really interesting. With varying caveats, we’ve known for a long time that Mars had water. More recently we got confirmation that it still does. But a lot… Read More »NASA launches MAVEN, there is much rejoicing

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Evaluating a news source

Jakob — Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:50:14 +0000

Most people seem to want news they can trust, and most people I know think that’s quite hard to find. There are many, many reasons for this, but I’m going to try (notwithstanding the 8,000-word first draft of this piece) to only talk about the ones that are most helpful if you’re trying to decide… Read More »Evaluating a news source

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A smartphone-based mobile lab?

Jakob — Tue, 09 Jul 2013 21:36:05 +0000

Engineers at Cornell University presented work on smartphone-based medicine at CLEO: 2013 last month, the Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics. Their creation is an external device that connects to a smartphone and can be used to diagnose Kaposi’s sarcoma and a slew of other serious conditions. Based on the press release, the smartphone itself isn’t doing… Read More »A smartphone-based mobile lab?

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