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 …
Category: Science Columns
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 …
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.) …
Coolest microscope ever!
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. When I was seven years old, I received a microscope for Christmas. It was my favorite gift ever, a window to a whole new world, especially when I turned it on pond water teeming with protozoa. Last week, scientists got their own belated Christmas …
Analyzing Oscar
As I write this, the announcement of nominations for the 80th Academy Awards still lies in the future. Nevertheless, I can make a make a few bold predictions: the actors nominated most likely appeared in dramas from major film distributors, and have either been nominated in the past or appeared in a film starring or …
Nature Number 1 revisited
Just over 138 years ago, on Thursday, November 4, 1869, the prestigious science journal Nature published its first issue. Now Nature’s entire archives have been digitized and made available online. (Not for free, alas: although you can browse the contents, you have to pay for complete articles.) Back in 1991, when I was communications officer …
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