Spliced feed for The Science Network

"Oops - We Nearly Forgot!" [SciScoop Science Blog]

Posted:

The sorry tale of what went wrong with our hospitals by Grace Filby It is all very well going up to London to research the military archives at King's College and the medical archives at the Wellcome Library, but then when you find some really basic stuff, that was hot news and top of the list a hundred years ago, even Nobel prize-winning, how do you get the message out there politely to the powers that be?

Moon can guide you to Mars on June 7 [Earth & Sky Podcast]

Posted: 07 Jun 2008 01:06 AM CDT

June 7, 2008. Tonight, the waxing crescent moon and planet Mars will be close together on the sky's dome. If you see them, you can also identify the golden planet Saturn and a blue-white star – Regulus – in the constellation Leo the Lion.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

Lead Astray [Sciencebase Science Blog]

Posted: 06 Jun 2008 08:40 AM CDT

Literal gun crime Reminiscences on a serious Stateside gun crime: You would think you wouldn’t find a less controversial topic to write about than the analysis of heavy metals using thermal ionisation mass spectrometry (TIMS). In some ways it must sound like the dullest topic in the world, beyond those who work with MS. However, when the metal in question is lead, and its source is ammunition then I should have been prepared for a flame-war from the US readership of one particular specialist publication for which I wrote on the subject a few years ago. The bottom line is don’t make flippant remarks connecting guns and ill health unless you want to be shot down in flames.

Anyway, the article in question (Instruments and Applications - Lead astray, from the now defunct Today’s Chemist at Work, can be downloaded here as a PDF) discussed TIMS’ analytical prowess and the serendipitous discovery by Australian researchers that it is not only those looking down the barrel of a gun who can end up with a nasty dose of lead, but perhaps even those holding the shooters themselves. With that article, it seems I hit a rather raw nerve in ending my feature with a rather glib question asking whether this might be a “healthy argument against bearing arms.”

In finishing with this throwaway query I was apparently jeopardising the very US Constitution. At least that’s the impression I got when my Editor began to forward the deluge of letters of complaint. I was accused of ignorance (not the first time), of having a political agenda (never), and even of being a “liberal” (perish the thought). One shooting chemist emailed in all uppercase letters to show his indignation:

“THE LAST SENTANCE SHOW YOU TO BE A LIBERAL WHO THINKS THAT GUNS ARE AN EVIL.”

Iron-ically, or should I say lead-ingly, another correspondent critical of the inaccurate portrayal of guns in fiction came to my rescue: “Keep up the good work, and kudos to David Bradley for a well-written article!” he proclaimed. So everything I wrote wasn’t all bad, after all.

Spelling, grammar, capital errors, and green spidery ink aside, the comments received highlighted an issue about which many readers of the magazine were, and probably still are obviously very passionate. I must confess, nothing I have written before has generated quite so many letters, perhaps with my repeating the misconception that a poison frog = a poison dart frog (not always, the case apparently).

Was I naïve to throw scorn, albeit flippantly, on the idea of bearing arms? My Editor and her colleagues were as stunned as I at how many letters the article generated, especially given that the magazine was targeted at industrial chemists and not the general public. However, the 99,967 or so subscribers who didn’t write in obviously didn’t feel that the attitude gap between opposite sides of the Atlantic was quite as wide as the few who did.

A post from David Bradley Science Writer

Lead Astray

Astronomers to begin dark energy search in 2010 [Earth & Sky Podcast]

Posted: 06 Jun 2008 04:06 AM CDT

More than 70 percent of all energy in our universe is thought to be dark energy. But – though theoretical models say it should exist – astronomers have yet to detect dark energy. Hear atronomer Karl Gebhardt of the University of Texas talk about trying to solve one of the greatest scientific mysteries of our time.