It’s not often you can boil down complicated abstract ideas of science or culture into simple concepts everyone can understand.  Gems like “for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction” don’t come along every day.   But every time someone asks me what science is like I simply say “You’ve seen The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.  It’s like that” and they nod knowingly.

What?  You haven’t seen it?   Read on my friends.   In a few key phrases you will know everything you need to know.  Science wisdom, as distilled by quotes from one of the greatest science films of all time (and it’s fun for Halloween too) – The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra. It’s also PG and totally safe for older children, unless your kid is prone to irrational fear of Skeletorama-motion plastic props and utters sentences like …

(more…)

It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists – a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

(more…)

Esquire magazine scribe Tom Junod recently wrote something that made me question my judgment and his sanity – namely that Franziska Michor Is the Isaac Newton of Biology.

Now, the last time someone compared themselves to Isaac Newton it was … well, okay it was me, but even I can’t be serious about comparing myself to Isaac Newton. Isaac Newton is a serious guy in physics. A giant. Maybe the giant. It’s one thing to make comparisons for dramatic effect, which a keen writer like Junod can do better than anyone, but another to make a serious case.

Isaac Newton is the metric for comparison because he is so fundamental. Isaac Newton to physicists is like a Prius is to environmental activists. He’s that important. So it would be easy to dismiss Junod out of hand because, let’s face it, he knows jack about science. But dismissing things out of hand is not what science is about so, instead, we will do what scientists always do when faced with a hypothesis.

Make a bunch of tables.

(more…)

Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with ‘paragenitals’ on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.

It’s Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.

Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about – though it’s still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs. Yes, male bat bugs use blood insemination and then the sperm have to swim to the ovaries.

It’s gruesome and bizarre and therefore completely worthy of a science article that transcends zoology and gets right to the sexual politics.

(more…)

There’s a lot of “Can X make you gay?” articles being written these days. This fellow says soy is making you gay and even the New York Times wonders if you have a gay car.

Now a study from the University of Pittsburgh says that fish from Pittsburgh rivers contain substances that act like estrogen.

Estrogen. The female hormone. So you’ll have to forgive me for the topical television reference, but when a show called Queer As Folk is set in Pittsburgh, ‘fish’ is going to jump in there rather naturally.

(more…)

Always thought women were the stronger sex? Okay, I admit it, me too.

But I am inclined to be a little skeptical when someone pimping their book cites ancillary evidence rather than studies so even if the logic is good I tend to maintain a healthy disbelief.

Ryuichi Kaneko and Dr. Kunio Kitamura, two of the co-authors of "Sex no Subete ga Wakaru Hon (Everything You Need to Know About Sex)" write in the Mainichi Daily News:

When an orgasm has been achieved through sex, you can measure theta waves. These are also said to cause the "running high" feeling of euphoria experienced sometimes by marathon runners. If theta waves are taken as a criterion, the entire brain emits theta waves when women reach an orgasm that are close on 10 times stronger than when men climax. So, if theta waves are an indication of an orgasm's strength, then women experience an orgasm that is physically impossible for men to go through. Putting it a little crudely, if the intensity of a woman's orgasm was played through a man's brain, there's a danger that the shock to his system would kill him. That risk makes it impossible to experiment on a man at the moment. And men can never become women.

(more…)

There was a time when the vagina was not in vogue. It was all ‘clitoris’ this and ‘clitoris’ that for female orgasms. Scientists have a healthy distrust of politicians and activists so we were afraid to stand up against the clitoral orthodoxy but in a secret enclave ( known as “New Jersey” ) a group of neuroscientists have been reverse engineering the female orgasm for the last two and a half years.

And they think they have discovered that the vagina has underrated by clitoral activists.Obviously you can’t just make that claim. Tests have to be done. Orgasms have to be studied. While scientists have caused plenty of orgasms most of us haven’t studied them. How do you study them? I wanted to know. Apparently the first step was to create a Calibrated Vaginal Stimulator, basically something you could attach to a transducer to measure the force that women apply to the vaginal wall. Then you could know what is really happening.

“A Transducer?” I ask. “Are we at Bose?”

“Women self-stimulate,” explains Rutgers neuropsychologist Barry Komisaruk, “and we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at which parts of their brains respond.”

Ummmm …

(more…)

It isn’t Jurassic Park but it could be. Scientists have begun to map the genome of the woolly mammoth and this has led to speculation that the creatures could be resurrected.

The easiest way to prevent extinct creatures from being created again is to simply not pay for it. The scientists have only mapped about 1% of the genome so far and would need serious funding to do the rest. Even when that’s accomplished, you can’t just stick that information into a big E-Z Bake Oven and pop out a woolly mammoth. They can’t even do that with modern DNA much less an extinct creature. But imagine if you could. I’d pay a lot of money to bring back Rita Hayworth.

Yes, I do actually have a framed “Gilda” poster in my house. No, I am not a gay man.