Tag: chemistry

Circadian desynchrony and the blue light special

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
December 10, 2012
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/12/Circadian-Deosynchrony-and-the-Blue-Light-Special.mp3[/podcast] We’re coming up on the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere: at the latitude I live at, in Regina, Saskatchewan, that means that today the sun rose at 8:49 a.m. and will set at 4:54 p.m. We’ll lose a few more minutes yet before the winter solstice. That’s not a lot …

On the naming of drugs

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 19, 2012
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/01/The-Naming-of-Drugs.mp3[/podcast] If you take a prescription drug, you’ve probably said to your pharmacist something like this. “Hi, I need a refill of the hydro… chloro… thoro… acti… zine? Zanc? Something like that.” At which point the pharmacist manfully chokes back his laughter at your pharmaceutical phonetics phailure, tactfully supplies the actual name of the drug, …

Spray-on liquid glass

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
February 4, 2010
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/02/Spray-on-Liquid-Glass.mp3[/podcast] “Spray-on liquid glass” sounds like a product you’d see advertised at two o’clock in the morning in an infomercial. It sounds even more like a 2 a.m. infomercial product when you see headlines about it that claim it is “about to revolutionize everything.” Maybe it’d sound more impressive if I used its more formal …

On the scent of odourprints

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
October 14, 2009
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/10/Odourprints.mp3[/podcast] You smell. No, I’m not being insulting. I smell, too. So does everyone else. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) human noses are not particularly sensitive, and so we only notice one another’s smells under certain circumstances, which we are all familiar with and I am therefore spared from having to enumerate. But to those of …

The saga of WD-40

By Edward Willett in Blog, Columns, Science Columns
July 22, 2009
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[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/WD-40.mp3[/podcast] For as long as I can remember, we’ve had WD-40 around our house, and I’m quite sure I’m not alone in that experience: most houses contain a can somewhere. But I’d never really thought about it, or even why it was called what it’s called, until this week, when I read the New York …

Making fuel from air and water

By Edward Willett in Blog, Science Columns
February 18, 2008
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Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. We can and do recycle all sorts of things. Paper, plastic, glass (OK, that last one not so much right now), Christmas fruitcakes…the list goes on and on. Wouldn’t it be great if we could also recycle the hydrocarbons we burn as fuel? Imagine …

Sweet science

By Edward Willett in Blog, Science Columns
December 13, 2007
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’Tis the season for peace and love and carols by the fire and decorated fir trees and all that sort of thing. ’Tis also the season for candy: candy canes, fudge, toffee, peanut brittle, bon-bons of all kinds. A lot of it is store-bought, but a lot of it is made from scratch. As Grandma …

Sweet science

By Edward Willett in Science Columns
December 13, 2007
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Taking on an environmentalist icon

By Edward Willett in Blog
June 11, 2007
1 mins to read
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John Tierney of the New York Times dares to point out the feet of clay of environmentalist legend Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. A sample: The obsession with eliminating minute risks from synthetic chemicals has wasted vast sums of money: environmental experts complain that the billions spent cleaning up Superfund sites would be better …

The early Earth may have been purple…

By Edward Willett in Blog
April 10, 2007
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…not green. Chlorophyll, it seems, may have been a relative latecomer.

Hard on the heels of my column about ray guns…

By Edward Willett in Blog
February 28, 2007
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…comes this story, headlined “Star Trek-like ‘Tricorder’ becomes science fact”: A press release at Purdue University has unveiled the startling news that a portable sensing system to analyze chemical components is now a reality. About the size of a large car battery, the unit is, at less than 20 pounds, much smaller than the refrigerator …

Eau de mer

By Edward Willett in Blog
February 5, 2007
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“The smell of the sea” sounds romantic in books, but being a prairie landlubber, I always kind of thought that the sea, um…not to put too fine a point on it…is rather stinky. At least at first whiff. Meet the culprit: dimethyl sulphide. “On bracing childhood visits to the seaside we were always told to …