Most people think of fossils as neatly mounted skeletons displayed in cool, clean museums with nicely printed labels at their feet. Unfortunately, says Tim Tokaryk, assistant curator of paleontology at the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History, they don’t occur that way in nature–though he wishes they did! Tokaryk became interested in paleontology as a volunteer …
Tag: science
Radio
Go on any long trip with several other people, as I did over the weekend, and a major source of conflict is sure to arise: what to listen to on the radio. But amid the debate on the relative merits of country, jazz, Top-40 and oldies (not to mention loud and soft), it struck me …
Telephones
It wowed audiences in 1964 at the New York World’s fair. It’s been “just around the corner” for decades. And now, at last, it’s here: the videophone has arrived. AT&T and MCI will both be selling these picture-sending telephones soon, for anywhere from $750 to $1,500 U.S., as the perfect way to show off new …
Soap
As any child of the television age knows, among the most important decisions one faces in life is which kinds of soaps and detergents to use. The consequences of not having clothes that are cleaner than clean and brighter than bright, or of using the wrong brand of cleanser on your pearly skin, are too …
Bicycles
I wouldn’t call myself a “serious” cyclist, since I don’t wear neon Spandex shorts and top, a colour-coordinated helmet, leather gloves or fancy cycling shoes. Heck, I don’t even have a water-bottle. But I do cycle a bit, and as I was puffing my way along the bike path the other day it seemed to …
Baseball
I’m lousy at baseball. Fly balls fly right over me, line drives make me duck, and I can’t run the bases worth a darn–but that’s all right, since I seldom hit the ball. So to write this column about the science of pitching, I turned to an expert: Robert K. Adair, Sterling Professor of Physics …
Kites
When Bob Dylan wrote about answers blowin’ in the wind, he must have had Saskatchewan in mind: here on the prairies, just about everything is blowin’ in the wind. (Whether that includes answers depends on how well the kids up the street held on to their homework, I suppose.) You can’t change this fact of …
November 1993 science anniversaries
This month’s science anniversaries begin with a first that was also a last. November 4 marked the 20th anniversary of the launch of Mariner 10, the first interplanetary probe to visit Mercury — and the last of the Mariners. Mariner 10’s main purpose was to photograph Venus, which it did from 5,770 kilometres on February …
Maps
A few years ago in Vienna, while touring with our university chorus, I and three companions, one male and two female, wanted to find our way from the edge of the city to Vienna’s famous giant wooden Ferris wheel. We men, of course, did the logical thing and began studying the subway map. The women …
Frost
We love to see it on trees, we hate to see it on our cars, and we fear it when our tomatoes are ripening: frost. Frost forms when water vapor in the air freezes onto cold objects. The Oxford English Dictionary defines three kinds: “hoarfrost,” the thick, crystalline stuff that makes your backyard look like …
Scientific hoaxes, Part 2
Last week’s column on Piltdown Man was supposed to be about scientific hoaxes in general, but my prolixity defeated me: I had a bunch of left-over hoaxes. In the spirit of Hollywood, therefore, I now present Scientific Hoaxes 2: Lost in My Research. Piltdown Man wasn’t the only fossil hoax. Faking fossils is a tradition …
Scientific hoaxes, Part 1
Science progresses not only when scientists have brilliant ideas, but also when they’re wrong. A wrong idea faces testing through experiments, and those experiments sometimes not only disprove the wrong idea, they uncover the truth. Because of this, science has always been susceptible to hoaxes. A well-executed hoax appears to have solid evidence behind it, …
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