Tag: science

The thinking cap

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/02/The-Thinking-Cap.mp3[/podcast] You know, it’s not easy being a writer. Oh, I know, it doesn’t rank up there with, say, coal miner in physical difficulty or neurosurgeon in mental difficulty, but where it probably has it over both of them is in creative difficulty: the pressure to constantly come up with something new. Heck, as a …

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Blue’s clues

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/02/Blue-Cheese.mp3[/podcast] I love blue cheese. It hasn’t always been so. As a child, I was of course immersed in the done-to-death running gags of the cartoon world, where smelly cheese (always Limburger, for some reason) seemed to be thought of as a sure-fire laugh riot. Outside of the cartoon world, I simply wasn’t exposed to …

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Redefining the kilogram

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Redefining-the-Kilogram.mp3[/podcast] This year marks the 220th anniversary of something that grew out of the French revolution and yet sparked a revolution in my own life, and the lives of many other Canadians of a certain age, two centuries later. I’m not talking about the guillotine, although it’s true I seem to vaguely remember a K-Tel …

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Cloning a mammoth

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Cloning-the-Mammoth.mp3[/podcast] One of the more striking exhibits at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum is the woolly mammoth that looms over you, emerging from a forest, when you round one of the corners in the Earth Sciences Gallery. Twelve thousand years ago, you might have encountered exactly that scene while strolling through Saskatchewan: these days, the closest …

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The world’s oldest winery

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/The-Worlds-Oldest-Winery.mp3[/podcast] My wife and I are wine enthusiasts. We belong to all the local wine societies, have written about wine for local magazines, occasionally conduct wine tastings and we’ve even got our own wine-related website, The Willetts on Wine (www.willettsonwine.com). That being the case, I keep an eye on wine news: and this past week …

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Confessions of a cyberchondriac

A few years ago I wrote several children’s books for the Diseases and People series put out by Enslow Publishers. It’s amazing when you’re writing about disease how easy it is to convince yourself you’ve got the symptoms of whatever you’re writing about. The first book was Meningitis. Stiff neck? You bet. Of course, I …

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It’s past your bedtime!

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/01/Its-Past-Your-Bedtime.mp3[/podcast] Ah, New Year’s. A time for resolutions, typically focused on living more healthily. Apparently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, not trusting us to do it ourselves, has decided to make our resolutions for us: it’s started 2011 with a series of stories lecturing Canadians on how unhealthy their lifestyle is, and started something called the …

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A better way to keep cool

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/A-Better-Way-to-Keep-Cool.mp3[/podcast] We all have our preferred temperature. Me, I like it cool. My poor college roommate can attest to that, since I just about froze him out of our room, aided by the fact I was tall enough to easily reach the air conditioning controls and he wasn’t. But hey, that was in Arkansas, and …

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Red means stop, green means go, yellow means…?

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/The-Yellow-Light-Dilemma.mp3[/podcast] I went through a yellow light today. I’d glanced away at the wrong moment, looked up to see the light had gone yellow, and realized I couldn’t stop without slamming on the brakes and probably skidding into the intersection. Later, I was crossing a street downtown when a van went through the yellow in …

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The grills of summer

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/The-Grills-of-Summer.mp3[/podcast] We’ve had at least one nice day so far this spring, and based on previous years (although, of course, as they say about RRSPs, past performance is no guarantee of future results) we may get at least one more before first frost this fall, so there’s just a possibility a few people may break …

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A treatment for Ebola?

[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/A-Treatment-for-Ebola.mp3[/podcast] A few years ago I wrote several books for Enslow Publishers in New Jersey for a series called Diseases and People. I covered meningitis, arthritis, hemophilia…and Ebola. My most recent book for Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist, also talks about Ebola, and some of the scientists who travel to the sites of outbreaks to help with …

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Ball lightning

Now that we’re finally starting to see some hot weather, it won’t be long before we begin to see something else: thunderstorms and lightning (very, very frightening me! Galileo, Galileo…sorry, just a little Queen flashback). It’s the lightning, of course, that makes thunderstorms thunder. If I may quote myself from a previous column, lightning “is …

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