Archive for category Fun Stuff
What Is It? #7
What Is It? #7 (click to enlarge)
It’s that time of the week again – time for our What Is It? competition. Same rules as always apply, check out the image and tell us what it is.
Last week we showed you this photo, and asked you what it is. The answer? It’s a photo of nanoparticles (in brown) attaching themselves to cancer cells (in violet) from the human abdominal cavity. This is actually pretty cool – scientists at Georgia Tech and the Ovarian Cancer Institute have further developed a potential new treatment against cancer that uses magnetic nanoparticles to attach to cancer cells, removing them from the body. The treatment, tested in mice in 2008, has now been tested using samples from human cancer patients. The results appear online in the journal Nanomedicine. [Image Credit: Ken Scarberry/Georgia Tech]
It was a difficult one, sure enough, and nobody got it entirely correct, but the closest to the correct answer was Stan T, with this guess:
Out of focus bone marrow aspirate, acute leukaemia, non specific esterase stain.
A partial congratulations to Stan T for coming closest – let’s see you all raise your game for this week’s photo!
Question of The Week: Which Question Do You Want to Answer?
Posted by Colin H in Fun Stuff, Question of the Week on February 27th, 2010
Last week we celebrated the one year anniversary of the Merseyside Skeptics Society with a special Liverpool Skeptics in The Pub, which included a live recording of our podcast Skeptics With a K. In a change from our usual dictatorial style, we asked the audience for suggestions for a Question of The Week, and ended up with two of them!
Questions that is, not audience members.
In the interests of fun, and because it means we don’t have to make a decision about it, we’ve decided that instead of choosing only one of them as this week’s question, we’ll let you answer both. Think of it as a Question of The Year as well as a Question of The Week, an extra special gift from us to you!
So this week’s Question(s) of The Week, courtesy of Andrew Johnston and Tom Williamson are:
1/ If you could have three dinner guests, one living, one dead and one ‘woo’, who would they be?
2/ What ‘woo’ presents have you received?
Maybe you have a thing for white beards and want to have dinner with James Randi, Darwin and Santa; or maybe you once recieved a ‘genuine’ Mayan crystal skull from a boyfriend or girlfriend. Whatever it is, we want to know. I’ll leave the definition of ‘woo’ here deliberately vague, so no-one feels limited. It’s up to your good selves whether you answer one or both questions.
Please leave your answers in the comments section below.
What Is It? #6
What Is It? #6 (click to enlarge)
It’s time once again to put your peepers to the test, with the latest edition in our ingeniously-titled ‘What Is It?’ competition. By now I’m sure you know the drill, and if you don’t it’s kinda self-explanatory, but here’s what you do:
1. Look at this photo
2. Tell us what it is
Pretty straightforward stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree. And cheers once more to Prof. Dowling for the image.
Last week we got all mushy and asked you what this photo is. As usual we got a good set of responses. Most got pretty close, although unfortunately for Barra, there was no doomed Martian lovers involved:
Is it the famous heart cliffs of mars? Where ancient alien civilisations used to jump like lemmings to the rocks below expressing their love for each other?
And no liquorice allsorts either; apologies to Ross Clark:
Is it a sample from the abortive Bertie Bassett factory at Sellafield?
What it actually is, is a rather cool Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM) image of palladium atoms. Amazingly, the heart is roughly a nanometre across.
No fully correct answers this week, but nearly all of you got most of the way there. Sophie, Jon d, Tom Williamson and Ellie all recognised we were looking at something very small, probably an STM image. Unfortunately, nearly everyone claimed we were looking at carbon nanotubes, and not Palladium, so no 100% pass rates today.
But you know what, as you were all on the right track, and as the image was in honour of Valentine’s Day and we’re all loving souls here at MSS, we’re going to credit you as having got this one right. So… well done, everyone!
What Is It? #5
What Is It? (click to enlarge)
Last weekend was Valentine’s Day, as you’re doubtlessly aware. Well, we’re not really the mushy sort here at the Merseyside Skeptics Society, so we thought we’d hold off on the love hearts, the the rose petals, and the rainbow-farting unicorns and let you all wallow in your skepticality.
Well, that was the plan, but then the Prof sent us this fantastic image for our What Is It? competition, so we figured bugger it – let’s embrace the love, people. So, what is it? Leave your answers below, as ever.
Last week we showed you this photo and asked you what it was. Contrary to what a lot of people might believe, it wasn’t ghosts, fairies, orbs or spirits… it was simply dust, lit up by the camera flash. Lot’s of you knew the correct answer, so we’ve a few winners this week – first off the mark was Lukasz, with:
I would say it’s dust on lens/negative. Or scratched negative before processing. I didn’t use Google!
We also have honorary mentions for this comprehensive effort from Jon D:
Fair and square I think we’re looking at light from the camera’s flash reflected off particles of dust suspended in the air and bounced back into the camera lens. You see it more often these days because the flash is mounted closer to the lens on compact digital cameras and the cameras are so complex people can’t work out how to switch the auto-flash off. They look blurry and possibly a bit 3 dimensional because they’re out of focus due to being too close to the lens.
Last week's photo
As well as this from Hampshire Skeptics founder DaveTheDrummer, who was first on our Facebook page:
It’s a dude reflected in a mirror.Perhaps I’m missing the point… With some crap on the mirror that’s reflected the flash you can see in the top right. Which is exactly where it should be for the view point.
Well done!
Question of The Week: What Makes You Angry?
Posted by Colin H in Fun Stuff, Question of the Week on February 13th, 2010
Being a Skeptic often means dealing with a huge amount of nonsense and woo. Most of the time, it’s not an issue. Generally, woo is harmless, or at least its harm can be easily identified and followed up on. Plus, it can be quite fun to research and examine strange claims and ideas, to try to uncover the truth, or lack of it , behind them. However, we all have our strong ideals and personal viewpoints, and sometimes woo isn’t simply something fun that you can play around with. Some of it can be downright dangerous, some of it can be mind-boggingly stupid, some of it just doesn’t make any damn sense. You can’t always respond with calm and objective kid-gloves: even Skeptics get angry.
So this week’s Question of The Week is this: What woo makes you angry? What pushes your buttons? What can’t you deal with? Maybe it’s the harm that can be caused by extreme religious beliefs, or homeopaths who claim to be able to cure AIDS. Maybe it’s just the fact that your brother/sister/husband/wife/parents just won’t listen to reason over something silly. Maybe psychics just piss you off. Maybe your best friend never makes it to the pub because he/she is too busy chasing UFOs.
Whatever it is, we want to hear about it. So feel free to vent your spleen in the name of Skepticism via the comments section below.
What Is It? #4
So, another week, another testing image for you. Take a look at Prof. Dowling’s latest submission, and see if you can tell us what we’re looking at. Leave your answers below, and we’ll announce the winner next week.
Last week we showed you this photo and asked you what it was. The correct answer was the HR 8799 system. In the center, you can see the host star HR 8799. Further investigation shows that three of the specks surrounding the star are planets (marked): Starting at 11 o\’clock, clockwise: HR 8799b, HR8799c and HR8799d. The other specks and patterns are artefacts, which are unavoidable in a challenging observation like this one – star and planets are extremely close, and the star is a few thousand times brighter than the planets. The distance from the star to HR 8799c corresponds to 38 times the average Earth-Sun distance. This image is the latest taken by European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, in particular its combined camera/spectrograph CONICA, which was developed at the MPIA and at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (M-PIES, which is quite a funny acronym). Image credit: MPIA/W. Brandner (MPIA = Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)
Which you guys knew, because you Googled the filename, like dirty rotten cheats. Still, credit where credit’s due, king amongst those cheats was Jon D, who first to correctly guess/Goggle the right answer. No Googling this time, people!
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