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A new spam type has appeared in my Akismet filter, viz., announcements for dissertation writing services. For example, DissertationResearch is a “custom thesis writing service that will always give you custom written dissertations and original thesis and dissertation service”; they claim they can deliver 100% authentic, fully referenced Masters theses written by certified writers about all kinds of […]

I just got a mail from Springer that offers me to publish my short article on crowdsourcing and museum acquisitions (forthcoming in NTM: Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin) in their so called ‘Open Choice option for Open Access programme’, so that it can be “freely available to everyone everywhere”. I love open […]

The good old History of Science Society (HSS) and most other history of science, technology and medicine meetings continue the tradition of organising endless rows of parallell sessions, each with the standard 3-4 papers á 20 minutes + concluding Q&A. But some societies are trying something new. Just got the call for next year’s Swedish history of science […]

Today (Nobel Day!), Thursday 10 December at 8pm, Obervatory/Morbid Anatomy in New York hosts a talk by Mütter Museum‘s new director Robert Hicks, titled “Exquisite Corpses: Illustrated Lecture & Artifacts from the Mütter Museum”. I guess it’s too late now to get on the morning flight (unless you borrow Air Force One which stands idle […]

My blood pressure rose this morning when I read Google CEO Erik Schmidt’s rebuttal of Rupert Murdoch’s attack on Google (published 1 December as an op-ed in Wall Street Journal, of all places). Not because he strikes back at the old newspaper dinosaurs. I don’t mind, I hardly read paper media any more. The reason […]

We have just recruited Morten Hillgaard Bülow as a PhD candidate. The three-year stipend is financed by the new interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen. The Center was established last year with a budget of 300 mill. DKK for a five-year period — and a smallish amount of the total will […]

… I just found a blogpost titled: Coffee, Sex, and Other Weird Ways to Not Get Sick. It lists seven weird ways for helping your immune system: 1. Kiss (and while you’re at it, have Sex)! 2. Listen to music. 3. Walk Really Fast, But Don’t Run! 4. Don’t Blow Your Nose. 5. Get Hot! […]

I haven’t been around natural history museum DNA researchers for a while. So I didn’t know there is actually an -omics discipline called ‘museomics‘ — “the large-scale analysis of the DNA content of museum collections”. It’s not a joke, they (the Center for Comparative Genomics and Bioinformatics at The Pennsylvania State University and others) mean […]

Did you know that even bacteria are annoyed by the music of Engelbert Humperdinck? (Yes, you are not the only one). E.coli bacteria can’t stand it. It’s all (sort of) true: Adam Zaretsky once spent 48 hours playing Engelbert Humperdincks’s “Greatest Hits” to a dish of E.coli bacteria to determine whether vibrations or sounds influenced bacterial growth. […]

I tried Microsoft’s Bing for the first time today and googl… sorry, binged ‘Medical Museion’ — and to my great surprise I found this poem dedicated to our collections written by American editorial consultant Shannon Hunt, titled ‘In the Collection of the Medical Museion’: The plaster busts of aged geniuses adorn the storage room. They […]

Many mysteries and fascinating aspects from the field of medicine have been discussed on this blog but I can’t remember that this interesting site has ever been mentioned. James G. Mundie’s Cabinet of Curiosity is a fascinating site and there is no doubt that the man behind is a skilled artist.  But what is it all about? […]

I’m probably not the only person who has a soft spot for unknown collections, especially if they turn out to be rich and reasonably well-curated. Today I became aware of the odontological collection at the University of Oslo, which goes back to the 1880’s when the Norwegian Dentists Association began acquiring objects; it was handed […]