Helen Arney > Quotes

“But when you’re only using edible cocktail ingredients to extract DNA, you need as much as possible in the first place. Strawberries are the connoisseur’s choice as they are octoploid, with eight copies of the genome in every cell. Yum.”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“Although the parallel truism, Wirth’s Law, states that software becomes exponentially slower to run as computer power increases, so the net gain from upgrading your hardware is much smaller than you’d expect.”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“Rorschach test, created by the Swiss psychologist who gave them his name. Hermann Rorschach never intended his blots to be used to assess personalities, but as a way to diagnose schizophrenia, and first published them under the unassuming title Psychodiagnostik in 1921. He never lived to see his namesake travel across the globe as he died the following year.”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“20 202 21 207 22 212 23 217 24 221 25 226 26 230 27 235 28 239 29 243 30 247”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“test.”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“world Lise Meitner gets nothing.S2 I think I’ll stick with this reality.”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“PSO J318.5-22 #4,298 IN EARTH-LIKE DESTINATIONS RATING: LOCATION: The constellation of Capricorn”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“shown in a 2011 research paper from Tuk, Trampe and Warlop: ‘Inhibition Spill-Over: Sensations of Peeing Urgency Lead to Increased Impulse Control in Unrelated Domains’. It turns out that a little bit of needing to go to the loo might actually help you focus on a given task.”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face

“But my favourite cautionary tale is of Australian junior doctor Barry Marshall and his pathologist colleague Robin Warren. In the early 1980s they disagreed with the general medical consensus that most stomach ulcers were caused by stress, bad diet, alcohol, smoking and genetic factors. Instead Marshall and Warren were convinced that a particular bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was the cause. And if they were right, the solution to many patients’ ulcers could be a simple course of antibiotics, not the risky stomach surgery that was often on the cards. Barry must have picked the short straw, because instead of setting up a test on random members of the public – and having to convince those well-known fun-skewerers of human trials: ethics committees – he just went ahead and swallowed a bunch of the little bugs. Imagine the joy, as his hypothesis was proved right! Imagine the horror, as his stomach became infected, which led to gastritis, the first stage of the stomach ulcers! Imagine his poor wife and family, as the vomiting and halitosis became too much to bear! Dr Marshall lasted 14 days before taking antibiotics to kill the H. pylori, but it was another 20 years before he and Warren were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. So, hang on, is self-experimenting really that bad if it wins you a Nobel Prize? I guess you can only have a go and find out…but please don’t go as far as US army surgeon Jesse Lazear: in trying to prove that yellow fever was contagious, and that infected blood could be transferred via mosquito bites, he was bitten by one and died. The mosquito that caused his death might not even have been part of his experiment. It’s thought that it could just have been a local specimen. But one that enjoyed both biting humans and dramatic irony. Gastrointestinal elements”
― Helen Arney, The Element in the Room: Science-y Stuff Staring You in the Face