One early example of moving away from this was the hantavirus discovered near Four Corners in the USA (the family of hantaviruses is named after Hantan in Korea). It was originally named after the specific location, then renamed Four Corners Virus, then finally renamed Sin Nombre virus (No Name virus) out of respect…

I still like to use Wikipedia but i haven’t made any substantial contributions in ages because i got sick of having my hard work reverted for trivial technical reasons while complete rubbish is allowed to stand. Primary scientific literature not allowed as references? Really??? Them why the hell do i see references to…

Here’s a Quora question about what a big bunch of viruses looks like to the naked eye. https://www.quora.com/How-would-a-vi…

These guys are so frickin cute. Yay science, but I hope this doesn't accelerate the illegal trade in seahorses because my first thought was I WANT ONE

Comparing it to CJ Peters' "Virus Hunter" also is an interesting exercise. One-man show vs teamwork...

I once sent an email to their general "contact us" address asking for their influenza microneutralization SOP because all we had was a shitty photocopy of a photocopy. Not only did one of their scientists send me a PDF, she also sent a couple of updated versions over the next few years.

Thanks for writing this.

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. It's the only science fiction series I've ever read that's given me a sense of the planet it's on being a real place, like somewhere you can travel around and see all these landscapes and mountains and canyons and things. And you HAVE to read the nonfiction "Mapping Mars" along…

The writing and acting were good enough to keep it funny for a couple of seasons before the racist, sexist, and nerd jokes got old.

Yeah the live attenuated vaccine in 42 days from detecting the index case made me LOL. I do worry that this kind of thing is going to give people the idea that scientists/government/Big Pharma is deliberately letting Africans die in the Ebola outbreak etc.

I've never heard of this! Thanks for the tip.

Anybody who holds a micropipette upside down is a terrible scientist.

Things going down on a parachute still hit the ground relatively hard, I don't think it would stop a huge chunk of machinery from crashing through someone's roof and killing people. A parachute is intended to save the object it's attached to, not any fragile structures it might land on.

A few months ago my spouse got hired as a contractor for Sierra Nevada Corporation (SpaceX's rival so I'm a little schadefreude about this news), he said his job is for Quality oversight of life support systems so my response was "You mean you're in charge of making sure the Kerbals don't die?" (boy plays several…

Yeah those are bizarre. I have seen a FEW, OLD style lab coats that have a cinch at the back so you could theoretically take the waist in a bit but I've never seen anybody, female or male, bother to do so.

My spouse works for an aerospace corporation and he says now they have something called a "random vibe table" to see how equipment stands up to shaking. Still think this is funnier.

Um...doctors and scientists? Granted i don't work in the specific field but I have run across the word "envenomated" in the context of "bitten by a snake/spider/whatever" in the medical literature a few times.

How the hell would you do that? They're not even related. They don't even have a similar structure. Hep A is a picornavirus FFS.

Sounds like a first year PhD student: bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of ideas that only make sense if you're new to the field. When I go back to grad school as an older student with a…

HIV is actually Risk Group 3 not Risk Group 4. As much as it sucks to be HIV-positive and be on antiretrovirals the rest of your life, it's not anywhere near as scary. Otherwise we would have to round up all the HIV-positive people and quarantine them. http://www.absa.org/riskgroups/vir…

They have been talking for years about replacing the Dryvax strain with Modified Vaccinia Ankara which is much safer, I don't know if they've gotten around to it yet.