While I am still some seven years away from having a teenager of my own, I well remember being a teenager, and being occasionally asked by an exasperated parent, “What were you thinking?” To which, as often as not, I replied, “I don’t know.” This was seldom seen as an acceptable answer. Had I but …
Category: Science Columns
Planets, planets everywhere
It’s been about five years since I last wrote about the search for extrasolar planets–that is, planets orbiting other stars. As I noted then, the idea that the universe is full of planets has been so firmly established in our minds by science fiction that it’s amazing to realize that we only found the first …
The face is familiar, but that can’t be your name…
Do I look like an Edward to you? You can be honest, since I can’t hear what you’re saying anyway. (Unless you give me a phone call, and I’d really rather you didn’t.) To me, of course, I do look like an Edward (and also an Ed, and, to those who knew me growing up, …
SCORE one for efficiency
This being hockey playoff season, everyone is talking about scores. In the hope I might be taken as something other than a science geek, I thought I would, too. So let me tell you what the score is regarding SCORE–the Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration and Electricity. SCORE is a joint research project by four U.K. …
Shifty eyes=better memory
The next time you’re talking to someone with keeps looking from side to side as you talk instead of right at you, don’t write them off as untrustworthy. They may just be trying to remember your name. Dr. Andrew Parker, a psychologist specializing in cognitive neuroscience at Manchester Metropolitan University in the U.K., recently presented …
Slow-wave sleep
The science of sleep was one of my earliest column topics, way back in 1991. And why not? After all, as I pointed out then, sleep is so important birds, fish, reptiles and mammals all do it, we spend a third of our lives doing it, and if we don’t do it, we die. Like …
Rust never sleeps
From nuclear terrorism to Earth-killing asteroids, avian flu and global warming, these days you can choose to set aside every hour of the day for a specific worry and never repeat yourself. To insure it stays that way, I’d like to introduce you to Ug99. Ug99 is a strain of black stem rust that attacks …
Eye, eye, sir!
It’s not very often that one runs across a scientific study whose methodology consisted largely of watching the Fox TV show COPS. But that was how Mardi Kidwell, assistant professor of communication at the University of New Hampshire, went about her research on “the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the …
The see-food diet
There’s an old joke that goes, “I’m on a see-food diet. When I see food, I eat it.” Brian Wansink, John S. Dyson Professor of Marketing and of Applied Economics at Cornell, says there’s a lot of truth to that old joke—and he’s done a lot of studies to prove it. (He’s also the author …
"The Spider-Goat Clones of Montreal," revisited
Every day or two I check the SiteMeter stats for edwardwillett.com, and today I noticed my visits were around 200 higher than I would expect (I usually get 350 to 450 visitors each day, but today I’m up over 600). A check revealed that the extra traffic is coming from people searching for “spider goat” …
Universal blood
Blood is always in demand, and not just by vampires. Blood transfusions mean the difference between life and death when people suffer traumatic injuries, or undergo major surgery. But there’s always been a problem with transfusions: people don’t all have the same blood type, and giving someone the wrong blood type is worse than giving …
The civilized way to fly
I love airships, and I’m not alone. Award-winning children’s author Kenneth Oppel, for example, obviously loves them: his recent novels Airborn and Skybreaker are set in an alternate world where airships, not airplanes, rule the skies. Canadian science fiction writer Karl Schroeder must love them, too: his novels Sun of Suns and Queen of Candesce, …
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