by Len Fisher | 25 May 2017 | Mini Stories from Science
May 23rd was Carl Linnaeus’s 320th birthday. When he died in 1778, his effects were put up for sale. Joseph Banks, then head of the Linnean Society, promptly bought his notebooks and specimens on behalf of the society.
by Len Fisher | 10 May 2017 | Mini Stories from Science
(If any readers can tell me the origin of this, I would love to know!) Academics, and especially critics, have long been associated with “high” culture. It is only within my lifetime that their attention has increasingly been drawn towards “low” culture, with Clive... by Len Fisher | 9 May 2017 | Mini Stories from Science
Long-time readers of these annals may recall that, when I first used the physics of biscuit dunking as a way to show how scientists think about problems. I received the following letter from a 12-year-old schoolboy: The boy’s name was Chao Quan. I wrote back to... 
by Len Fisher | 5 May 2017 | Mini Stories from Science
Saturday, April 22nd saw scientists marching in the streets in over 500 cities around the world. Just the week before, another march took place in Washington; a march to decry Donald Trump’s failure to release his tax returns as promised. My op-ed submitted to... 
by Len Fisher | 7 Apr 2017 | Mini Stories from Science
My latest Ockham’s Razor talk for Australian ABC Radio National. How some of us can’t recognize facial patterns, but how most of us fall for imaginary patterns in the real world, and what we can do about it. Here is the link to the podcast:... 
by Len Fisher | 13 Feb 2017 | IgNobel Prize, Mini Stories from Science
The following wonderful letter appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine forty years ago. If the IgNobel Prizes had existed then, it would surely have been a leading candidate for the medicine prize. Who says that scientists don’t have a sense of humor?!...