Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of…
Augmented reality app for librarians instantly shows which books are misfiled
E-books, iPads and Kindles may be the way of the future, but most of the world’s knowledge is still stored in millions of good old paper books on library shelves. So researchers at Miami University have created an augmented reality app that makes all those books easier to organize. ShelvAR instantly analyzes an entire shelf,…
From Alexander Pope to “Splice”: a Short History of the Female Mad Scientist
The mad scientist is an icon of modern popular culture, but critics have traced its origin back centuries. Yet there seem to be few female mad scientists. Which is odd, because the first significant fictional mad scientist was a woman. Brian Aldiss, in Billion Year Spree (1973), puts the mad scientist’s origin in Mary Shelley’s…
