A couple of weeks ago I wrote about dandruff, bad breath, growling stomachs and body odor. Aside from the fact that none of these things are ever likely to be the subject of a blockbuster TV movie, they have something else in common: they’re all likely to embarrass us. That segues nicely into this …
Tag: science
March 1994 science anniversaries
This March seems to be a month for important scientific birthdays, beginning with March 4, the 600th birthday of Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. Prince Henry began sending out expeditions along the Atlantic coast of Africa in 1418, motivated as much by hatred of the Muslims and a lust for gold as by a …
Fertilizer
Just so I’m not operating under false pretenses, let’s get one thing straight: I don’t garden. I don’t seed, I don’t weed, I don’t plant, I don’t compost, and I don’t spread manure (this column excepted). My one connection with the plant world is mowing the grass, and I wouldn’t do that if I had …
Erosion
As water starts to run this time of year, it takes away more than the memory of winter’s snows: it also carries away a lot of soil, dumping it in the nearest ditch, which carries it to the nearest river, which carries some of it eventually to the sea. Sometimes the water also finds its …
Heredity
“She’s got her father’s eyes.” “He’s got his mother’s nose.” From the moment a baby is born, expect children to look like their parents. But how does it happen? An Austrian monk named Gregor Mendel took the first step toward our modern understanding of heredity in 1866, when he published a theory of inheritance based …
Glue
Since I only wear glasses late at night when I take out my contacts, for the past couple of years I’ve been making do with an old pair of frames broken in two places: the nose piece and the right earpiece. I must have glued them back together a dozen times, but the repairs never …
The science of love
could be considered the worst possible person to tell anybody anything about love, being a 34-year-old single male whose only claim to romantic fame is an apparently unerring ability to be attracted to women who immediately thereafter fall head over heels for someone else, sometimes during our first (and only) date. On the other hand, …
Galileo
One scientific anniversary stands out above all others this month: February 15, the 430th birthday of Galileo Galilei. Born near Pisa, Italy, in 1564, Galileo entered the University of Pisa as a medical student, but found that mathematics interested him more. Though he never got a degree, he was made professor of mathematics at his …
Plastic
I vividly remember a science fiction book I read as a kid about the destruction of civilization by a new strain of bacteria. It didn’t kill people: it ate plastic. Electronic equipment disintegrated, clothes dissolved, airplanes fell apart, buildings burned–modern society ceased to function, so dependent had it become on plastic. If our ancestors lived …
Satellites
Satellites have been much in the news recently–or, if you were trying to watch CBC Newsworld last week, in the absence of news. The failure of the Anik E-2 satellite drove home as nothing else could have just how important satellites have become to our everyday lives. (People really sit up and take note when …
Happy 40th anniversary, USS Nautilus!
There’s not much in the way of interesting scientific anniversaries on my list for this month, which suits me fine, because it means I can focus on the one that interests me most: the 40th anniversary of the launch of the world’s first nuclear submarine, the USS Nautilus, on January 21, 1954. I don’t …
Coffee
Ask the average coffee drinker where coffee comes from and he’ll probably say “South America.” Coffee actually originated in Ethiopia, where the coffee plant grows naturally. Coffee has been drunk in Arabian countries for centuries, but was only introduced to Europe in the mid1600s. Plantations established in European colonies in Indonesia, the West Indies and …
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