Dexter's "science"

Sometimes in TV spectacular science is presented as mundane while standard science is presented incorrectly. Here's an example.

During a recent episode of Showtime's "Dexter" some "science" was deployed. After all, Dexter is the lab (Dexter's laboratory :) ) technician in a police department. In the episode he managed to get some DNA from the killer at a crime scene - to their credit they did point out the hair was pulled out by its roots (most TV shows seem to get DNA from hair clippings which is pretty impressive). The DNA database didn't give him a match but he then decided to go for the mitochondrial DNA in the hope the mother may be on the database. With the click of a button an instant match came up.  It conveniently belonged to someone he knew so his next logical step was to get a photo of this woman's child. Once scanned into the computer he used a "magic" program (which could still be indentified as photoshop) to add 30 years onto the 6 year old child. Hey presto it churned out a picture with a 97% match (no idea what stat was used) to ANOTHER person he just happened to know.

Pros: They know you need roots of hair to get a DNA sample
         They know that mitochondrial DNA is inherited from the mother.

Cons: I don't think you can age people on computer software that quickly or that accurately.
          I don't think you can sequence DNA and do a search that quickly either.

Dara O'Briain's Science Club

This one has passed me by largely because it's in a weekday time-slot that doesn't suit me and then I always forget to check it on Iplayer. In typical fashion, I managed to catch an episode only to discover it's the last in the series. Bit of a shame as it's actually quite good.

Science Songs

This song popped up on my mp3 player and I'd never considered the relevance to science. It definitely feels like a song about a project that isn't working!

These Wooden Ideas by Idlewild;

"I bet you don't know how to sell Conviction" - those talks are always the toughest...

The Guardian's "20 Big Questions in Science" - Biology FTW!

The Guardian is having quite a good run of late with a broad range of interesting articles and I applaud anyone giving people a daily dose of interesting science to people :)

This one tackles 20 of the big questions in science which covers cosmology, physics and things that very much concern us. Any of them would make a good platform for a sci-fi tale (may of them are already staples of sci-fi eg time travel).

Does Science (Research) Suck? - Possible Solutions

Continuing the post about researchers disillusionment with science, I thought I'd be proactive and make some silly/serious suggestions for how things could be improved.

Control Freak!!!

I'm going to try and post these whenever I encounter them. One of my gripes, as a scientist, is when anything is presented as a "scientific truth" but lacks the most basic of scientific principles - a control.
Without a control you have no idea what is actually causing an effect or whether the effect is merely the result of the experimental procedure itself. If your test is different from your control(s) then you can claim there is a significant difference.
I've touched on the subject before and think it's useful to try and point out other examples. It should hopefully appeal to the anally retentive scientists who read and help make non-scientists aware of the concept and allow them to be a little more cynical of "facts" that are presented to them on TV/media.

Does Science (research) Suck?

There is a great little article on The Guardian site where Kayleigh Dodd highlights issues that a lot of research scientists share. Myself included.

Kayleigh points out the plight of a research scientist is that they have a very limited shelf-life of about 8 years after their PhD where they essentially have to become a group leader or get out. The problem is that regardless of whether every postdoc were to publish yearly in Nature and/or Science they aren't all going to get their own lab. There simply isn't enough money, especially in the current climate, to allow for such exponential growth. So that leaves the vast majority of postdocs in a situation where they aren't going to be group leaders and therefore have to leave academic research and hopefully find some other career because permanent postdoc positions or senior lab manager positions are few and far between. So unless we have a scenario where everyone naturally moves into another job of their own choice we seem to have a pyramid scheme that throws you off if you don't reach the peak in time.