"Dance Your PhD" Finalists Announced

sciencehabit writes "Science Magazine has posted the 12 finalist videos from its annual Dance Your PhD contest. The contest asks scientists from around the world to send in videos of themselves interpreting their research in dance form. As usual, this year's finalists have gone all out with some wacky, fun, and just plain bizarre videos. You can vote for your favorite, with the winner and reader's choice announced on November 21."

Comments

I'm Danceing for cash to pay off my loans

[Joe_Dragon]

I'm Danceing for cash to pay off my loans.

Re:I'm Danceing for cash to pay off my loans

[PopeRatzo]

I'm Danceing for cash to pay off my loans.

You and every other girl at the "gentlemen's club".

Do you need to obfuscate even more?

[vlueboy]

"The relevance of tick bites to the production of IgE antibodies to
the mammalian oligosaccharide galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose".

Mr. finalist, we give you have 10 seconds to explain the title of your thesis, never mind its contents. Then, empirically prove your dance matches it. AAAAnnnd. GO!!!

Re:Do you need to obfuscate even more?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean? That isn't obfuscation, it's very specific and clear.

An apocryphal quote says...

[QRDeNameland]

Writing about Neurobiology is like Dancing about Particle Physics. Or something like that....

The best schience dance video

[Shompol]

Best schientific dance I have seen

Re:The best schience dance video

[Patent Lover]

If I didn't know better I'd swear it was a Monty Python sketch.

Not sure which is more understandable...

[tlhIngan]

Not entirely sure, but the dances aren't helping me understand the thesis anymore than the report does...

You can probably get away doing the Macarena and I'd probably believe it's related to your work...

Re:Not sure which is more understandable...

[interkin3tic]

It's clearly meant to be fun and engage people in scientific research, not replace reading actual journal articles. The main benefit might be getting researchers to think about how to present their ideas in different ways. It's an issue with many scientists.

If I asked a friend how his research was going, he would start rattling off gene name acronyms and abbreviations for experiments and I would get totally lost a minute into it.
Interkin3tic: "Hey man, how's the research going?"
Friend:"Well we did a co-ip of MAD when conjugated at the kinetochore of a meiosis haploid culture with GFP tail swap nup52 and then quantified pixel intensity based on subresolution microscopy on the spinning disc and found the number was 410 instead of 320."
Interkin3tic: "Uh... oh. You still work on plants, right?"

That sounds like something like he would say and I would get out of it about as much as you got out of it. And I was familiar with his research: I proofread his papers and discussed it with him regularly. We're not the best communicators, we get way too technical way too quick. Making us communicate without technical terms is a good way to encourage better communication. And without communication, there's little point to science.

That said, I would never want to see him dance anything, let alone plant molecular biology.

Bad Project

[umafuckit]

It's not a "Dance Your PhD", but I love this Lady Gaga parody: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0 Better than the original, I reckon.

Is linking so hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why the editors here always have a bunch of links (in this case just one) in their articles, but none of those link to the actual event the submission is talking about.

It's always just another news site or shitty blog. Why the fuck do you make it so hard to get to the actual content? Are you retarded?

Awesome!

[gstoddart]

This can only be made better by having a special category for people who have been nominated for an igNobel prize.

Can you imagine the hilarity of interpretive dance about a bra which "in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander."

I mean, come on, that would be pure comedy gold. I can see entire improv events around just that one thing alone, and the entirety of the igNobels would provide endless hours of entertainment and wackiness.

You could make the home edition and everything. Like charades, but with dance, and the oddest damned things you've ever heard of.

Me, I'm looking forward to dancing the one "for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using bacteria extracted from the feces of giant pandas."

Chick post

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad hardly any women read Slashdot

Music

[Mark of THE CITY]

I was tempted to put a few lines of "Good Vibrations" in my dissertation as it explains the experimental side perfectly.