I have a confession to make: although born in the United States, I’m lousy at that country’s national pastime. I hit not, neither do I catch. If I had a dollar for every fly ball I dropped as kid, I could buy…well, a baseball glove, probably, but what would be the point? So this week …
Category: Columns
Milestones in musical technology
I’ve always had an interest in the myriad ways art and science intersect: not surprisingly, Leonardo da Vinci is a hero of mine. Few arts have been altered more by advances in science and technology than music, a point made by New Scientist’s Technology Blog recently when it listed five milestones in music technology (and …
Just the flax, ma’am
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. Last week I wrote about converting agricultural residue such as wheat straw into bio-fuels. But there are other uses for some crop residue. Take flax straw, for example. For most flax growers that phrase immediately provokes the Henny Youngmanish riposte, “Please!” That’s because flax …
Spinning straw into liquid gold
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. Rumplestiltskin, in the famous fairy-tale, has the knack of spinning straw into gold. We can’t do that–but we are learning to spin straw into something just about as valuable: biofuel. Sure, you can make ethanol out of corn or wheat, but in a hungry …
Surprised by joy
Over at my main website I’ve got quite a few arts columns archived from my brief stint as a columnist for inRegina.com. A lot of them were about long-passed events, but a few are more general, and every now and then I may pop one up here, like I did the column about art and …
Mind-reading machines
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. I’m a hard-line skeptic when it comes to the topic of ESP (extra-sensory perception). I don’t believe in telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, or people bending flatware just by looking at it. That said, I’m pretty confident that in the near future mind-reading will be possible. …
Science fiction architecture
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. Once upon a time, I took a vocational aptitude test in high school guidance class. By that time I already had a pretty good idea I wanted to be a writer–specifically, science fiction writer–and yet, writer did not show up very high on the …
Hemophilia: stopping the bleeding
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. To receive these columns weekly by email, just provide me with an email address at edward(at)edwardwillett.com or in comments. *** A few years ago, I wrote a children’s book on hemophilia, an inherited condition in which the blood fails to clot properly. Which meant …
Popcorn
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. *** There’s been a lot of attention paid to the movies this past week due to the various awards handed out between old clips of previous awards being handed out that aired on TV Sunday night. Which got me thinking about the food that …
Making fuel from air and water
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 …
What lies beneath
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. The house in which I live was built in 1926. Over the years, as we discovered recently when we had the walls of a couple of rooms repainted, several layers of wallpaper and paint have accumulated. Peeling back those layers is a bit like …
Tearless onions
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. I’m a sensitive kinda guy. I fact, I’m so sensitive I sometimes tear up just during the process of making dinner. It’s not that I’m overcome with emotion at the blessing of having at my disposal the wherewithal to stir-fry. (I’m not that sensitive.) …
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