Victor Hugo is best known for his novels Les MIserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Though it’s probably more accurate to say that he is best known for going off on extremely long tangents in said novels. Such as the infamous twenty six pages about the Paris sewer system. Though really, the eighteen chapters […]
The planets that were known in ancient times were, naturally enough, named after the Roman gods. When more advanced instruments let us discover even more planets, it only made sense to continue that theme. But the choice of the god of the sky has led to some irresistible jokes. So today we’re looking at some […]
When you look at a list of animals by their common names, it will generally start with aardvark and ends with zebra (or zorse…). But when it comes to scientific names, the extremes of the alphabet get a little more extreme. And at least in a few cases, their positioning in alphabetical list is quite […]
Welcome to the new Saturday posting schedule! In honour of that, today we’re talking about… spite! Spite is an amazing thing. It’s actually the reason that Diane Duane started writing for Star Trek, which is simply fantastic. It’s also one of many ways to pick a name for a species. You’re not supposed to pick […]
In honour of Black Friday, I figured I’d do a post about crass commercialism in science. I’ve discussed the many ways species get their names in the past. But today we’re looking at some examples of species named for sponsors. There was a fine old tradition of naming species for the rich guy who coughed […]
There are a lot of living things on the planet. This is probably pretty obvious, but the important part here is that it means they have to name a lot of species. I’ve discussed some of the science fiction and fantasy references in species names before. And of course, I’ve advocated for a strong liberal […]
They say there are two gateway drugs to science: dinosaurs and space. So it’s no wonder the names for astronomy related projects tend to be quite… romantic. We named what we saw in the sky after old gods, and we kept that theme going when we travelled to them. Often space projects are named for […]
When a new species is discovered, there are a lot of options for naming it. As long as you don’t name it after yourself, you can basically do what you want. A significant physical characteristic. The place you discovered it. An important mentor. Or, well, we saw from fruit fly gene names that scientists are […]
I’ve spent most of this week writing about science for kids. So for a change of pace, today we’re looking at some naughty science acronyms. We are all very mature scientists who would never giggle upon realizing that the acronym is something a little risqué. Dirty jokes about Uranus are of course rather well known, […]
Today we’re moving over to biology, because chemists definitely don’t have a monopoly on being silly. I’ve already shared some funny NMR terminology, so today the fruit fly geneticists get to have their turn. Fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster) are a very popular organism for genetic studies because you can get so many generations so quickly […]