It depends on where you visit, but maybe a little of both. This NY Times article from last week tries to distill apart the complex reaction of visitors within the vessel of a science museum and sniff the ether of what’s to come. A science museum is a kind of experiment. It demands the most elaborate equipment: Imax…
From a science perspective, the great frozen stuff is the unsung hero in all these sports. Its slick surface (and low friction) allow skates, skis, snowboards, sleds, and curling stones to slide smoothly, with a lot of help from some talented athletes, who have trained for years. Of course, it also creates all kinds of…
It’s the end of an era. The rover team has decided to leave Spirit where she is. Other than getting the solar panels in better position to catch sunlight, the rover will become a stationary science center. This morning, the NY Times had a story that didn’t sound particularly optimistic. But this afternoon, the rover…
Back to my favorite space topic– the Spirit rover. I’m fascinated by the meticulous science and engineering effort going into an obvious obstacle: a robot stuck in the sand. The only problem? The robot and the sand are millions of miles away. So far, even though it’s been 8 months, Spirit’s still stuck. But scientists…
Though my writing life ranges from writing health stories for teens to writing about research topics and careers issues for scientists, the sources that I speak with for the former type of article generally don’t overlap with those for the latter. Until now. Last spring, I was working on an article about the common cold,…
I prefer my seaweed applewood smoked. However, truthfully, before yesterday, I’m not sure I could have told you whether I liked seaweed, smoked or otherwise. I do like sushi, but the seaweed within a maki roll has always seemed more functional than flavorful– a necessary material to keep the whole thing held together. But when…
I get to talk about an interesting application of carbon dioxide today in my latest article for Scientific American: sterilizing transplanted tissues such as tendon and bone. Before I heard about this technology, I certainly wouldn’t have suspected that the ubiquitous gas that we exhale could become a super-scrubber with a little heat and a…
Though the tryptophan rush from turkey is more hype than reality, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to put up the most structurally complex of the amino acids, tryptophan. The body uses it to make serotonin, and biochemists use its absorbance of ultraviolet light to determine concentrations of proteins in their samples. Today I’m thinking that…
My scientific world is probably best defined as medium-to-small. Because there’s usually a tie-in to a molecule, my conceptual world operates somewhere between the slightly sub-nanometer to human sizes of meters and kilometers. Except for my occasional forays into astronomy, I don’t often stretch my mind to light-years or cram it down to subatomic particles.…