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Broken Hearts: Not Just Fodder For Songwriters

If you feel like you have an achy breaky heart, you may not be imagining things. "Broken hearts"...

The fight to block your arteries

Clogged arteries everywhere are taking sides in the sure-to-be epic battle for your cholesterol...

Abstinence-only Interventions: If You're Gonna Do It, Do It Right

To get it on or not get it on, that is the question for adolescents and teens. The Bush administration...

Holy retraction, Batman

Sorry to take the wind out of your sales, parents who use Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper on MMR...

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Becky JungbauerRSS Feed of this column.

A scientist and journalist by training, I enjoy all things science, especially science-related humor. My column title is a throwback to Jane Austen's famous first line in Pride and Prejudice

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Ever feel like you're just one of the sheep, phoning it in every day in your office cubicle? Well, Jean-Luc Cornec is the guy for you. Cornec constructed a herd of sheep out of rotary telephones and their cords, which was on display at the Museum of Telecommunication in Frankfurt. The repurposed phones are oddly perfect in their new form - if you saw the "sheep" quickly out of the corner of your eye, you'd think they were real! Don't be sheepish, it could happen to anyone. Ok, I'll dial back on the jokes. I just wanted to give this artist a ringing endorsement. Hopefully it impressed ewe as much as it did me.


The strangest idea for a reality TV show that I've heard to date comes courtesy of Slashdot this morning. "Terminal illness got you down? Does your future seems bleak? Channel 4 and production company Fulcrum TV would like to brighten your day by making you the star of an upcoming documentary."

A British TV station and production company are "currently keen to talk to some one who, faced with the knowledge of their own terminal illness and all that it entails, would nonetheless
consider undergoing the process of an ancient Egyptian embalming," according to an advertisement.


If the coming Olympic games handed out gold medals for news coverage of medical topics, the coveted podium in a winner-takes-all contest would likely be a lonely place. Not that there aren't worthy contestants, but like figure skating's Michelle Kwan in 1998 and 2002, the hopefuls need a few tweaks before they can triple-axel their way to success.

The latest and greatest miracles, break-throughs, and fads are trumpeted in the news, and the newsroom's dwindling coffers combined with a "have to beat the other guys to it" 24-hour news cycle means consumers are often shortchanged.


That's right, my love for the periodic table can now be extended to my phone! My sweet Palm Pre features the periodic table in its app catalog, with such data as:

  • Oxidation Status
  • Boiling Point
  • Melting Point
  • Electron Configuration
  • Electron Negativity
  • Atomic Radius
  • Atomic Volume
  • Specific Heat Capacity
  • Ionization Potential
  • Atomic Number
  • Symbol
  • Name

After Top Gun, the number of fighter pilot recruits exploded. After CSI took over the country, more people went into forensic science. The lesson? Media definitely makes a difference in the level of interest of a topic - An Inconvenient Truth, anyone? - so perhaps getting authentic, real-life science out in front of viewers could inspire a whole new flock of scientists and engineers to fill the growing deficit in our workforce.


"Physicists who want to protect traditional Christmas realize that the only way to keep from changing Christmas is not to observe it."