Imagine you're playing a game of basketball--running down the length of the court, your shoes squeaking and you're fingers bouncing the ball about every 2 strides. You're darting left and right, about to sneak under the goal, leap over defenders, and slam it in for 2 points.

The fans cheer in a wave of pure elation. (Admittedly, a creative imagination.)

What to do when you get the sore, swollen throat of strep throat or the painful, yellow oozing of an infected cut? Take an antibiotic.

What to do when you get the pesky coughing and sneezing of the common cold/flu or the itchy spots of chicken pox? Take an antiviral?

Not always.

The trouble with antiviral medications is that, unlike their widely used counterpart the antibiotic, they tend to damage human cells as well as nasty virus particles. Antibiotics (which kill bacteria not viruses) do minimal damage (relatively) to our own nearby cells.

Researchers at the Université de Lyon in France, have discovered what appears to be an unexpected new form of ultrahard diamond and a new ultrahard form that was previously predicted, both harder then commonly found diamond. These forms were found in the Havero meteorite, which fell to earth in Finland in 1971. The meteorite was split up and spread around research facilities around the world, with the Université de Lyon conducting research on the 30µm thick, 4mm by 4mm square piece of meteorite they were given.

If you ignore for a second the constant forward-looking attention Internet news demands and stretch your mind back to the Mad Cow Disease scare of 2004, you might remember thinking "how strange that proteins can act as pathogens in the mammalian body!"

Mad Cow scares us because it's an enigma--a protein disease that acts like it has DNA. But now it's looking more familiar, as researchers prove it mutates very much like a DNA or RNA virus or bacteria.

In February, Germany's Highest Court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht ruled on the motion of a German residing in the Swiss city of Zurich, to pressure the German government into trying to stop the operation of the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine ever built, and that also has an easy to misspell name.

Gillian McKeith is back. The show that she inflicted on Canada last year has reached the UK.

Eat Yourself Sexy is not being shown on Channel Four, but is on the much less viewed Discovery Channel on Monday nights.

This is the blog I wrote about the show last September when it aired on the W Network in Canada.

It's fair to say that 2010 hasn't been a vintage year for homeopathy so far. At the end of January, a mass public 'overdose' by critics aiming to demonstrate the fact that homeopathic remedies contain no active ingredients received widespread coverage. Weeks later, the Science & Technology Select Committee released a report that damned not just homeopathy, but the homeopaths themselves, ultimately concluding that homeopathy works no better than placebo, and that NHS funding for the alternative medicine should be scrapped.

A trial release of a tiny Japanese insect has been sanctioned by DEFRA to try to control the spread of Japanese Knotweed, a rapidly growing introduced plant that reportedly costs over £150 million per year to control.

From the Ada Lovelace website:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited. Just sign the pledge and publish your blog post any time on Wednesday 24th March 2010.

On the 5th of July 1732 Thomas Gordon was indicted for robbing one John Cooper, of Number 11, Eagle-court, the Strand. The two men had taken a walk together in Chelsea Fields 'to a secret place', and Gordon had threatened Cooper with a knife unless he gave up all his clothing and his jewellery and changed it with Gordon's. At first, it appeared to be one of those robberies that happens late at night on Clapham Common, between two previously unacquainted gentlemen. The vast majority of such crimes are never even reported let alone prosecuted even in these 'enlightened' times, so the fact that John Cooper brought this to trial in 1732 is quite astonishing. The trial that followed was to be even more incredible.