Odd Tweets...

I briefly discovered Twitter a while ago…and quickly decided that I didn’t like it. There are a few people who manage to tweet interesting and funny twitter, but most of it is advertisement (see me live here now!) dull (I’m gona update you on every little thing I do every moment of the day…) or just plain weird… So I quickly ran away again.

However a friend of mine is working very hard in ‘science communication’ and decided that for fun (and practice) she’d set up a blog with a few of us guest authoring posts (The Birds and the Bees…) and in addition there would also be…Twitter.

So after much deliberation I decided that just for her I would try again this evil thing they call ‘twitter’… I will post the occasional sciency tweet or bee update as ‘thesciencesays’ (look right, and down a bit...ok down a lot...then don’t click on the links ‘cos they try to open in the tiny window! Silly thing. Right click ‘open in new tab/window’ instead. Much better!)

I still don’t like twitter…but I have found a few people on there I like…Nick Baker for one:) He used to present The Really Wild Show a few years back and I may have had the biggest crush on him (well he was hot and had, to me, the perfect job in the world! He got to travel all over the place and see the most amazing animals ever and then tell the world about them! Brilliant!)


I’m sure there are many other people worth following too, it’s just a case of digging through the stuff you don’t like to find it…maybe later…for now Pav time. Very cheap alcohol and good company, what more could you ask for, chocolate you say? Well they have that too! Woo Hoo!

Facebook oddities...

Have you noticed these raising awareness things on facebook? ‘Cos I keep completely missing them. Yes my awareness has completely failed to be raised. Well not completely as I’m now writing this post...but I do keep missing them at the time.

The first one I missed was people posting odd colours...which turned out to be bra colours. This was somehow meant to be linked to breast cancer awareness. I’m not sure if I missed it because I don’t go on facebook enough, am generally unobservant or just simply expect people to post odd crud in that ‘message of the day’ section. But I completely failed to take part...and strangely I don’t really care.

Next they tried to repeat the above (which was I vaguely remember reported a lot on the news at the time...) by getting you to write about ‘where you like it’ nudge nudge wink wink...although what we’re really talking about is your handbag... This one I did know about if only because my little sis (or more accurately my middle sister who being younger than me I can call my little sis...who has incidentally just got engaged!!) sent me a message with all the details...but I don’t actually have a handbag...or if I do then it’s probably buried at the bottom of a cupboard somewhere...so I didn’t take part in that one either. That I’m not overly worried about either. I’m not sure I noticed anyone else getting involved either...

The one I am annoyed about is the most recent one (at least the most recent one I actually spotted) where people changed their profile pics to show their fav cartoon characters! Now that I would have liked to do. What better excuse for a fun nostalgic google search for cartoon oddities? I admit that I probably could still join in now, but I feel it may be a little late for all that.

The idea was to have a break from pictures of real people in the hopes of somehow raising awareness against child abuse...so I guess I’m already ahead of the game on that one. See I haven’t had a real picture of me as my profile pic for...ages. I hate having my pictures taken (although me and Miss Millie’s witchy photo shoot was hilarious fun!) but generally my facebook pictures tend towards odd animals instead. At the moment in fact it’s a bunny sat at a computer...

Which reminds me, look up and right, yep there’s another bunny. I’m not entirely sure why. It’s not like I have a thing for bunnies or anything. In fact blog bunny is actually a plot bunny (anyone who writes fanfic will know what that is) ’Plot bunnies lurk in the strangest places’ including apparently tea cups and my profile pictures... Maybe I should have a change... I mean I've picked up some odd icons over the years...

Odd Bob does Science...

I am doing proper science at work atm! Not that I don’t always do proper science; but normally it’s behavioural experiments (watch the bees completely fail to do what you expect them to do, or what you don’t expect them to do, or in fact anything interesting...then come back tomorrow and do it again!) Or the ‘fun’ job of writing everything up (if you can’t guess, that was sarcastic. I really don’t like writing reports)

Today however I was actually in the lab. I was even wearing a lab coat! I was doing stuff that involves acronyms that make no sense to most non-scientists (or me most of the time)! I feel strangely more scientific than normal, and in celebration of this I decided to find some odd science to blog about.

You can eat cloned meat!!

On the BBC news site the other day was the amazing news that we can eat cloned meat without becoming oddly mutated or dying of cancer or anything. (Damnit and I was looking forward to becoming a Marvel super hero!) This isn’t anything new. A pilot study back in 2005 came to exactly the same conclusion. Besides in the US many farmers breed from cloned animals to increase yields.

In the UK however we’re still a little freaked out about all this new science like GM and cloning. Then some cloned meat was accidentally sold and eaten this summer and I guess people wanted to do more checks. Besides the Soil Association were getting their knickers in a twist again. The point is that there is no significant difference between cloned and 'natural' cattle in terms of the milk and meat produced.

Will this report stop people freaking out about these 'novel foods'? Um...I doubt it. But the main argument against GM and cloning that I actually agree with is that we don't yet know enogh about the long term issues asociated with them, so I guess we have to start somewhere. Maybe one day cloned meat will be as normal to us as any other food. We cetainly have to find some way to feed our ever growing population.

I’ll probably write a fuller post about this on The Birds and the Bees at some point. It looks interesting...

In the mean time I’ll continue dreaming of some radiation/GM/other random experiment at work going horribly wrong so that I gain amazing new super powers...