In 1899, Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. patent office, proclaimed, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” He was wrong, as Popular Science‘s recent awards for “the best of what’s new” from 1999 reveals. These inventions and breakthroughs give us a glimpse of what’s in store for us in the 21st century, …
Tag: science
Umami
My wife and I recently returned from the annual International Festival of Wine and Food at the Banff Springs hotel, where the master of ceremonies, Tim Hanni, presented a fascinating (and very funny) seminar on matching wine with food. Much of Hanni’s talk was devoted to exactly how the sense of taste works. It’s …
Level Four labs
The images are familiar from TV and movies: scientists in plastic space suits in a high-tech laboratory, desperately trying to identify some mysterious germ threatening to wipe out humanity. Usually, such scenes are set at the Centers for Disease Control laboratories in Atlanta, Georgia, but in the future, they could be set in Winnipeg, where …
The Ig Nobel Prizes of 1999
Some people think scientists are a dour, serious lot. For proof they are nothing of the sort, look no further than the scientific awards ceremony held last week at Harvard University. The most famous scientific awards are, of course, the Nobel Prizes. These were not those. These were the Ig Nobel Prizes, which annually honors …
Science fiction
My interest in science owes a lot to a form of literature my brothers introduced me to at a very early age, and which quickly became my favorite: science fiction (SF for short). Before science fiction was called that there were two writers who nevertheless get included in the genre: France’s Jules Verne and England’s …
Crop circles
Last week, Ken and Linda Mann found two mysterious circles in the wheat on their farm, about 75 kilometres south of Saskatoon. Three kilometres to the west, Hutterites from the Brethren of Dinsmore colony found five more. As crop circles go, these were relatively mundane. The most complex designs appear in England, like the one …
“Is real science killing science fiction?”
We live in a science fiction world. Desktop computers, the World Wide Web, genetic engineering, cloning, space stations–they were all the stuff of science fiction not very many years ago. This poses a problem for today’s science fiction writers. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to write “hard” science fiction, based on real, plausible scientific thought …
Immunization
As the latest crop of First Graders trundle off to school, I can’t help thinking back to my first year of school in Texas, and the badge of maturity I proudly wore on my left arm: the round scar produced by smallpox vaccination. It proved I was practically grown-up. Today, kids no longer receive smallpox …
The bandwidth bonanza
August 30 was the 30th birthday of the Internet. On that day in 1969 a group of scientists and technicians at UCLA plugged two computers together through a refrigerator-sized box designed to let them talk to each other–and it worked. Originally involving just four university-based computers used by only a few dozen people, the Internet …
Missions to Mars
Thursday, September 23, 1999, wasn’t a good day for NASA. At 5:01 a.m. EDT, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million (U.S) space probe intended to observe Martian weather for two years, fired its engines to enter orbit around Mars and dove behind the planet. It never reappeared. After several hours of study, NASA announced …
Skateboarding
Skateboarders have become as much a part of the urban landscape as pigeons, scooting down the roads and sidewalks, jumping over curbs, turning any ramp, railing or set of steps into an excuse for acrobatics–seemingly defying the laws of physics. Skateboarding may seem like the ultimate in turn-of-the-millennium hipness, but it’s been around a long …
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