Science Music

For those of you who remember my post about performing climbing assays with flies (if not then have a look here) a song has recently come to mind as a potential anthem. It probably required a few months of repeating the experiment for the realisation to occur that Radiohead fits quite well.

Splice - Movie Review

Splice is a 2009 science fiction film directed by Vincenzo Natali (all the pertinent info can be found on wikipedia). Given it's about biologists creating an artificial chimeric life-form I thought it would be worth a look.
To my relief the film isn't actually a horror film despite the trailer being edited to make us think that.

Biologist point-of-view review: Prometheus

Oh dear - what a mess.

Science Songs

I'm sure this song was supposed to be about losing a girl but I was listening to it yesterday and it reminds me a lot of science and getting a PhD or paper. Bear with me and listen carefully...

How did Superman's powers ever evolve?

The explanation for Superman’s powers are one of the more simple ones in comics. He’s an alien from the planet Krypton and that’s why he is super strong, can fly and shoot lasers out of his eyes. Fair enough. You can’t really argue these facts as we don’t know anything about the alien physiology. Where things start to fall apart though is the suggestion that Kryptonians are solar powered – specifically under a yellow sun. The problem with this is that the planet Krypton has a red sun. My question is “how on earth Krypton did Kryptonians evolve to have super powers under a yellow sun?”. 

The British Invented DNA!

Today's a lazy day (I'm actually preparing for an interview) so I'm just reposting something from my other blog (when this one was just a twinkle in my eye), which was after watching David Cameron, on the Andrew Marr show, make a pretty bold claim.
Luckily someone has put said clip on youtube.

Science Songs

There's a surprising amount of science that turns up in music, which is nice as it means that it's working it's way into the public mind. Sometimes it's obvious from the title but the best ones are where they sneak a science term into the lyrics. What I'll do on "busy" days is stick up a "Science Song" and you can work out the connection to science. So as not to be accused of making it too easy the first song I'll give you is Red Hot Chili Peppers "This is the place". I think this has a particularly clever use of a biological term and I wonder if a geek has ever tried to use it as a pick-up line?

Fevre Dream - George RR Martin

Another shameless plug of one of my favourite authors although this time I'm afraid I'm going to have to pull him up on some nonsensical biology, which put an infuriating tarnish on an otherwise excellent vampire novel.
Fevre dream tells the tale of a 19th centuryvsteamboat journey along the missisippi that acquires some unsavoury mythical guests. The book is actually very good and perfectly blends the feel of the deep south with horror.
One of the things I enjoyed about the book is the authors approach to the vampires in that he treats them as biological creatures rather than fantastical ones. To this end he goes to some interesting lengths to establish them as an off-shoot of humantiy - I won't go into details but half the fun is in discovering his "rules" for vampires.
There is one rule that upsets me though and I guess this is technically a little bit of a spoiler so you probably shouldn't read on from here.

Game of Thrones

Ok, for my first commentary on science in fiction I'm going for HBO's "Game of Thrones" based upon the amazing "A Song of Ice and Fire" series by George RR Martin. But that's fantasy, I hear you all cry. Well you'd be right but there's still a surprising amount of genetics in it, so much so that it's the key to one of the show's central mysteries.
So what are these tenuous connections with biology that I'm claiming the show features? Well in order to do that I'm probably going to have to spoiler warning the following as it does contain a discussion of plot elements from the series. So be warned if you click on the following and haven't seen the first season of the show there are some big spoilers!!!