Blog

(For our Danish readers): I en pressemeddelelse i dag fremlægger Forskningsrådet for Teknologi og Produktion (FTP) en ny og spændende videnskabsteori: Amerikanske og engelske forskere har for nylig vist, at det rent faktisk kan lade sig gøre at designe en “usynlighedsfrakke” .. Indtil videre er usynlighedsfrakken ganske vist kun teoretisk bevist. Men videnskabshistorien viser os, at mange teorier […]

If you understand Danish this seminar on the ethical status of aborted foetuses organised by BioCampus at the University of Copenhagen might be of interest (Tuesday 20 March, 10am-4pm, University of Copenhagen, Humanities Campus, Njalsgade 80, room 24.2.07): Hvornår kan et foster med rimelighed siges at være en person? Seminaret tager centrale elementer i debatten […]

One of the central features of museums is that they are venues for the visitors’ emotional confrontation with the past. Material objects add a new affective and aesthetic dimension to the relation between spectator and ‘representations’ of the past which can be described in terms like ‘authenticity’, ‘presence’ and ‘lived experience’. Those interested in such problems of historiography and […]

Reminder: the dead-line for abstracts to the “Science & Public”-conference at Imperial College, London (19 May 2007) is next Thursday, 1 March. Write to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com . For earlier announcement, see here.

Susanne’s recent comment to Søren’s post on the collection of MRI scanners a few weeks ago raises an important question about the ‘aesthetics of decay’. I.e., how do we handle incomplete, pillaged, delapidated etc. machines and machine parts, or as Susanne puts it: ‘ruins’? There is a lot of discussion about ‘the aesthetics of decay’ and a lot of photo material […]

The Danish electronic research database has decided to co-operate with Google Scholar, The national universities are continually feeding the DEFF data base which is then automatically updated to Google Scholar. A small step in the direction of balancing the bias towards US/UK science and scholarship which, among others, the head of Bibliotheque National de France complained about […]

The Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation and the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick are inviting to a one-day workshop on “Health, Governance and the Global: Cultural Histories and Contemporary Practices” on 9 March, 2007. Increasingly, the ‘global’ has become an ever-more regularly invoked term—both in popular anxieties about […]

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in collaboration with the Branco Weiss fellowship “Society-in-Science”  is inviting to a workshop in Berlin on March 1-4 (organizers: Christina Brandt, MPIWG Berlin, and Giuseppe Testa, IEO Milan):    This workshop is intended to further an interdisciplinary and international discussion on historical, cultural, social and philosophical issues of cloning and stem […]

Wait a second … Dad? Is that you dancing there? This 20-minute long educational video “Protein Synthesis: An Epic on the Cellular Level”, was made in 1971, and has since become a classic to generations of high-school and college science students.The dance event was filmed on an open field at Stanford University. Most of the […]

Thanks to Benny Thaibert at bit2b we have now got our new design. Hopefully the blog is much more functional now. The big issue was the wallpaper: some suggested a yellowish grandma pattern, others hated the whole idea about wallpaper, so this was the compromise: a hardline biomed-iconic pattern (microarray analysis repeat pattern = sort of symbolises translational medicine). Enjoy or dispise, but remember […]

The New Media department of the Science Museum started a blog called “Science Museum Dev” (short for development, I guess) last July to spread news “about some of the work we do, developing websites and interactive exhibits for one of the most famous museums in the world”. Unfortunately they haven’t updated it since November — please […]

The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research funds a Summer School course on ethical, legal and social aspects of nanobiotechnology and nano-medicine, which will be held by the Centre for Bioethics, Muenster University, 21 – 28 September 2007 in Muenster.