It’s no secret that Jen-Luc Piquant is a huge fan of the TV series Bones, and last week’s episode was particularly amusing because it poked fun at Hollywood and science consultants. Entitled “The Suit on the Set,” the plot brought Booth and Brennan to Tinsel Town to visit the set of a fictional movie being [...]

Most science history buffs are familiar with William Herschel, the famed astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus in the 18th century. His son, John, is less well known, perhaps because his scientific interests ranged more broadly than his father’s. He loved the stars, it’s true, but he also found wonder much closer to home. Evidence [...]

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider had an unexpected and diminutive visitor a couple of weeks ago: Kern the Traveling Gnome. The plucky little ceramic figure has already visited Lima, Mumbai, Mexico, South Africa, San Francisco, New Caledonia, and Sydney, Australia, the South Pole, and SNOLAB, an underground neutrino observatory in Ontario Canada. And now, apparently, he’s [...]

The Internet is filled with surprising things. Jen-Luc Piquant stumbled across a fascinating independent short film project the other day, called Casimir Effect — the brainchlid of UK filmmakers Gabriel Strange and Lydia Wood, and starring Torchwood‘s Gareth David Lloyd as the male lead. It’s still unfinished, with fundraising efforts ongoing, but the premise seems [...]

James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster movie Titanic broke box office records and garnered bushels of awards; it remains one of the top-grossing films of all times. A large part of its appeal lay in the central (fictional) story of the doomed young lovers, London socialite Rose (Kate Winslet) and impoverished American artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), [...]

A recent post over at Ptak Science Books taking a look at the golden age of gelatin inspired me to dig up one of my favorite older posts from 2006. Behold, the glory of Jell-O! One of my favorite scenes in the film My Best Friend’s Wedding is the heart-to-heart conversation between bride-to-be Kimmi (Cameron [...]

Who among us doesn’t yearn to experience, even briefly, the sensation of weightlessness in space? Small wonder, then, that Jen-Luc Piquant is excitedly pinching her virtual pennies, hoping to save up enough for a spot on the new extreme roller coaster being designed by a company called BRC Imagination Arts. The twist: the design mimics [...]

Over at Ars Technica, we note an intriguing feature by Curt Hopkins on the use of physics-based technologies in archaeology — in this case, LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging). It highlights the work of archaeologist Chris Fisher, who has been using a LIDAR system to map the terrain of Western Mexico: Several years ago, Fisher [...]

Who says science can’t swashbuckle with the best of them? Jen-Luc Piquant was so very thrilled to learn this week that MIT has been harboring bona fide, certified pirates in their midst. (h/t: The Mary Sue). Indeed, MIT has been doing the certifying! It’s been going on for 20 years, albeit in an unofficial status: [...]

Spider silk seems to be all the rage these days. In January, a one-of-a-kind spider-silk cape debuted at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, created over eight years using silk from more than 1 million Madagascar golden orb spiders (Nephila madagascariensis). And just this week, a Japanese scientist from the Nara Medical University announced [...]