Category: Blog

December 1993 science anniversaries

‘Tis the season for December’s science anniversaries, and there’s a biggy this month: the 90th anniversary of the first successful flight in a self-propelled heavier-than-air craft. But first, two other flight-related anniversaries. Twenty-five years ago, on December 21, 1968, NASA launched Apollo 8. The crew of Col. Frank Borman, Lt. Col. William A. Anders and …

Continue reading

Static electricity

  I’m a little nervous as I word-process this column about static electricity, because every computer owner knows (and usually learned the hard way), that static electricity is a Bad Thing. Static electricity, however, has been around longer than computers:  like, forever.  The first time anybody noticed, though, was around 600 B.C., when the Greeks …

Continue reading

Potato chips, popcorn and pretzels

  The Grey Cup just ended, but the Rose, Cotton, Orange and Super Bowl are still to come. It therefore seems apt to delve into a subject with which I have a great-deal of hands-on experience: the Three Ps of snack food, potato chips, popcorn and pretzels. Potato chips were invented in a Saratoga, New …

Continue reading

Headaches

Few afflictions are more common than headaches. Statistics (themselves the cause of many headaches) show that in the U.S., up to 50 million people go to the doctor for headaches annually. They’re continuing an ancient tradition. Around 5000 B.C. in China, acupuncture was the treatment of choice. About 160 B.C., the Greek physician Galen recommended …

Continue reading

Bones

Our bones, being hidden away inside our skins, are not something that we normally think about much. But once you break one, it’s hard to think about anything else. I had an early introduction to the subject when I was seven years old and my big brother broke my arm. Not deliberately: we were rolling …

Continue reading

Fossils

Most people think of fossils as neatly mounted skeletons displayed in cool, clean museums with nicely printed labels at their feet. Unfortunately, says Tim Tokaryk, assistant curator of paleontology at the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History, they don’t occur that way in nature–though he wishes they did! Tokaryk became interested in paleontology as a volunteer …

Continue reading

Radio

Go on any long trip with several other people, as I did over the weekend, and a major source of conflict is sure to arise: what to listen to on the radio. But amid the debate on the relative merits of country, jazz, Top-40 and oldies (not to mention loud and soft), it struck me …

Continue reading

Telephones

It wowed audiences in 1964 at the New York World’s fair. It’s been “just around the corner” for decades. And now, at last, it’s here: the videophone has arrived. AT&T and MCI will both be selling these picture-sending telephones soon, for anywhere from $750 to $1,500 U.S., as the perfect way to show off new …

Continue reading

Soap

As any child of the television age knows, among the most important decisions one faces in life is which kinds of soaps and detergents to use. The consequences of not having clothes that are cleaner than clean and brighter than bright, or of using the wrong brand of cleanser on your pearly skin, are too …

Continue reading

Bicycles

I wouldn’t call myself a “serious” cyclist, since I don’t wear neon Spandex shorts and top, a colour-coordinated helmet, leather gloves or fancy cycling shoes. Heck, I don’t even have a water-bottle. But I do cycle a bit, and as I was puffing my way along the bike path the other day it seemed to …

Continue reading

Baseball

I’m lousy at baseball. Fly balls fly right over me, line drives make me duck, and I can’t run the bases worth a darn–but that’s all right, since I seldom hit the ball. So to write this column about the science of pitching, I turned to an expert: Robert K. Adair, Sterling Professor of Physics …

Continue reading

Kites

When Bob Dylan wrote about answers blowin’ in the wind, he must have had Saskatchewan in mind: here on the prairies, just about everything is blowin’ in the wind. (Whether that includes answers depends on how well the kids up the street held on to their homework, I suppose.) You can’t change this fact of …

Continue reading

Easy AdSense Pro by Unreal