LabLit.com article

There's an interview about Under Laboratory Conditions on LabLit.com

Blue Sky Flowers

Blue Sky Flowers (If you'll forgive my petit bourgeois smugness) Liz, our lovely garden designer, has a charming picture of our garden on her website. It's the rightmost inset.

Imperfect Mirrors

Imperfect Mirrors is cafe scientifique on left and right handedness. It's at the photographers' gallery tomorrow (Tuesday) at 7pm. My colleague Ashish Ranpura is chairing.

Neo-phrenology?

I've always claimed that the thing that really let the phrenologists down was their statistics. There is increasing evidence to back up the original claim, although not perhaps about the shape of the *outside* of the head. Commenting on her nice new research on language "Dr Narly Golestani from UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience said 'The bigger picture is that we are starting to understand that brain shape and structure can be informative about people's abilities or pathologies - why people are good at some things and not others is evident from these scans.'"

Wellcome Wellcome

So, after 15 odd years it's finally happened. I'm leaving active research science and moving to active science engagement. I'm going to be leaving UCL to manage part of the Public engagement development group at the Wellcome Trust, starting at the beginning of June. Gulp.

Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2006

Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition 2006 boasts a particularly high-class line-up.

Sync Mac Smartphone

My father just got a rather cool smartphone as a birthday present. Two things for interest. Firstly, it turns out there are options for him as a mac user to sync his Windows PC phone. Two comparative reviews are here and here. They both prefer Missing Sync over Pocket Mac, although I kind of like the underdog. The other weird thing is trying to work out what kind of phone he's actually got. It calls itself an O2 MDA, but it turns out to be made by HTC. What's strange is that this company makes a load of phones but only sells them branded through mobile networks. There are whole websites devoted to trying to work out which model is which, since there seem to be multiple variations. It's a self-effacing brand model which I never saw before.