“Water, water, everywhere, and all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere Nor any drop to drink.” –Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner It’s one of the ironies of nature that although three-quarters of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, only a very small percentage of that water is drinkable–as the Ancient …
Category: Science Columns
Water
It’s colourless, odourless and ubiquitous, covering 74 percent of the Earth’s surface. But even though water is one of the most common substances on the planet (although it doesn’t seem that way some years in Saskatchewan), in terms of its special properties, it’s also one of the most uncommon. It’s a good thing, too, because …
Seeding
The modern farm is highly mechanized, but the goal of the farmer driving a $100,000 tractor across multiple hectares remains the same as that of a farmer scraping the ground with a pointed stick: a successful harvest. Before you can harvest a crop, though, you’ve got to plant it. The trick to planting is to …
Viruses
You can hardly pick up a magazine or turn on the TV these days without hearing about viruses. Dustin Hoffman battles them in the film “Outbreak.” Richard Preston’s “The Hot Zone” is a best-seller. AIDS is regularly in the headlines. In Zaire a whole city is quarantined to contain an outbreak of Ebola. It’s amazing …
Skin
Quick! Name the largest organ of the body! The liver? Bzzzzz! Wrong. The large intestine? Bzzzzz! Even wronger. Here’s a hint: it’s waterproof, comes in a variety of designer colours, and fits any shape of body. Yes, it’s the skin, and yes, it’s an organ, a specialized mass of tissue with a surface area …
Wartime rationing and making do
In today’s war against environmental degradation, there is an oft-repeated slogan: “Reduce, Re-use, Recycle.” Fifty years ago there was a very different kind of war going on, but there was a very similar slogan: “Use it Up, Wear it Out, Make it Do and Do Without.” Every country involved in the Second World War had …
Computer memory
A while back (quite a long while, actually) I wrote a column about memory, in which I made the point that our ability to remember things is what distinguishes us from dandelions. You might also say that our ability to remember things is what distinguishes us from household appliances and other inanimate objects, but if …
Running shoes
I have the flattest feet of anyone I know, so running is not something I do if I can avoid it. When it comes time to purchase running shoes, therefore, I simply walk into the store, pick out something inexpensive in my size, and walk out again. The decision is far harder, I am told, …
Cholesterol
Archaeologists five thousand years from now, piecing together a picture of our civilization, might well conclude that we were a highly religious culture, all worshipping at the altar of the great god cholesterol, whose name appeared on all of our food containers and who was a constant topic of discussion in books, magazines and newspapers. …
Eggs
It’s eggciting for me this week to be able to eggspound on that most eggcellent eggsample of nature’s eggsquisite bounty: the egg. (For one thing, few other topics lend themselves to such eggceedingly eggscruciating eggsamples of eggcessive wordplay.) I’m going to focus on the chicken egg, although scientifically speaking the chicken egg is only one …
Bodily functions
Our bodies are complex biological machines performing millions of tasks all the time, most of which we aren’t aware of. But occasionally some function of this machine draws itself to our attention, usually at an inopportune time. Just why certain bodily functions are embarrassing and/or annoying to ourselves and those around us, when, after all, …
Libraries
I love libraries–always have–and I can’t help noticing: they’re changing. Libraries, traditionally, have been repositories for books. In fact the word derives from the Latin word for books, “liber.” But today you’ll also find newspapers, magazines, videotapes, films, CDs, computer programs and even terminals hooked up to the Internet. This is not your father’s library. …
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