Download the audio version.Get my column as a podcast.*** Going on a long car trip this summer? Planning to make good time? Going to drive all night, maybe? Well, don’t. Statistics are somewhat unreliable, because there’s no good way to test for it, but it’s estimated that about 16 percent of all vehicle accidents are …
Category: Science Columns
A sound that’s out of this world
Download the audio version of this column. Get my science column weekly as a podcast. **** Summer is the season for outdoor music festivals. Here in Regina, for example, the Folk Festival will fill Victoria Park with music this weekend. But as you sit on the grass at your favorite festival listening to your favorite …
I’m officially podcasting!
I’ve decided to try turning my weekly science columns into a weekly podcast, and the first episode (“Prosthetics”) is now at its permanent home (I know, I posted it earlier in the week using Box, but now it’s at avMYpodCast.com, which also automatically indexes it with iTunes). Everything is very bare-bones right now and I …
Audio version of my science column
I’m hoping to start podcasting my science columns weekly, though it may take me a while to get myself organized enough to do it that regularly. Still, here’s my first attempt. Audio quality isn’t outstanding, but it’s probably OK for now. Enjoy!
Prosthetics
Humans are amazing creatures, but we aren’t invulnerable, and every so often, we lose a piece of ourselves to accident, attack or disease: a finger, a toe, a hand, a foot, or even an entire limb. And sometimes, of course, due to a genetic problem, we’re even born without a particular appendage. This is hardly …
Sing out, Louise!
Opera seems to be making a comeback. The Metropolitan Opera’s simulcast of productions to movie theatres around North America has been selling out. If you see an opera in the movie theatre or on television, you probably take it for granted that you can hear the singers over the orchestra, because everything on television is …
On the pouring of ketchup
It’s not easy to find the perfect topic for a mid-summer science column, when people are more interested in getting to the lake, swimming in the pool, or barbecuing in the backyard than– Wait, wait. “Barbecuing in the backyard…” I think I’ve got it–the perfect summer science topic! Thanks to Robert Allgeyer, whose definitive paper …
And the first shall be…first
A few years ago I wrote about the effect of birth order on personality, a topic of particular interest to me as the youngest of three boys. At the time I noted that birth order has been studied since early last century, when psychologist Alfred Adler suggested that an only child may become over-protected and …
Sleep now, or forever hold your Zzzzzs
Are you getting enough sleep? Probably not: the average North American sleeps an hour less per night than was common 40 years ago. Ordinarily, if we fail to get enough sleep one night, our body attempts to make up for it during the next night by sleeping longer and/or sleeping more deeply. Since alarm clocks …
Pottery (nothing to do with Harry)
I majored in journalism in university but I minored in art. (Well, actually I minored in Dungeons and Dragons, but the university refused to give me credit for it. Go figure.) Of all my art classes, my favorite was pottery. I loved making pots, but as a certain hideously ugly four-kilogram cream pitcher can attest, …
So you think your job is bad?
Whenever you think you have the worst job in the world, there’s a sure-fire antidote: check out Popular Science‘s annual listing of the Worst Jobs in Science. Tenth on the list this year: whale-feces researcher. Rosalind Rolland, a senior researcher at the New England Aquarium in Boston, combs the Bay of Fundy looking for brown …
WiTricity? Why not?
Unless it’s your smoke alarm saving your life, mysterious electronic beeping in the middle of the night is highly annoying. It certainly annoyed Marin Soljacic a few years ago when he found himself standing in his kitchen in his pajamas in the middle of the night for about the sixth time in a month, staring …
My latest live walk and vlog
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