Homely Scientist

Costas Efthimiou is bursting our bubble here.  He’s gone through and poked holes in some of our favourite Halloween monsters, ghosts, zombies, and vampires.  He looks at the physics of ghosts being able to walk on flours and pass through walls (no can do he says … but wait what if they aren’t really touching anything just in a different dimensional plane, huh?).  Zombies in Hati just being the victims of a neurotoxin (okay I knew that one … Anthro does come in handy).  Vampires, if they existed, we’d all be one (I guess he hasn’t seen Blade movies where …read more

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Effect measure is starting a series on influenza, how it works, how it transmits, and how it mutates.  This first post is a background post.  I won’t claim to grok it, that will take another couple reads and more coffee, but I will say that this is a topic we should all spend time learning more about.
Tags: flu, influenza, bird flu

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One of my favourite parts of the whole Halloween pumpkin carving tradition is roasting the seeds.  I just thought they were a great snack with lots of iron and fibre … guess there’s more to the story, from Science Blogs

They report that, “From the results of the present study it is concluded that pumpkin seed protein isolate administration was effective in alleviating the detrimental effects associated with protein malnutrition and carbon tetrachloride intoxication.” Terblanche and colleagues explain that this indicates that pumpkin seed protein isolate has powerful antiperoxidative properties.

Tags: pumkin seeds, healthy snakcs

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As reported on Quirks and Quarks (amongst other places), the complete genomic sequence of the honeybee has been completed.  This means all the genes have been located and identified.  Why is it important that we have the whole honeybee genome sequenced?  Because honeybees are vital to our existence.  Honeybees still pollinate the majority of the food crops we eat.  Honeybees are also under threat from several diseases and parasites (the bee mite is the most well known … and responsible for wiping out a large number of North American bees).
By knowing the genome of the bee, scientists can work on …read more

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I was up late watching TV and I saw an episode of Mythbusters that I hadn’t seen before.  It was done over the summer and it featured, yes you guessed it Diet Coke and Mentos.  They answered a lot of the questions surrounding this fun little experiment and clarified for my why the B-day part coke geyser, didn’t geyser.
Okay first thing, it has to be Diet Coke and mint Mentos.  I’ll get to the reasons in a second.  I did use mint Mentos, but cheepo regular cola for the geyser and that’s why my geyser was a tad whimpy.
The question …read more

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Yeah I know that over half the time it was pretty fruity 70s stuff (aliens, bigfoot, UFOs), but In Search Of with Leonard Nimoy was always a fav of mine.  Yes, I liked Mr. Wizard.  Not so much for Bill Nye the Science guy (who I met and have his autograph … though it was a bit disconcerting to have him comment on the women walking by at the function).
So … what’s your fav?  Come on, don’t be shy …
Thanks to Afarensis for the idea
Tags: science tv

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Just why is it that warm pop is fizzier than cold pop?  The answer isn’t what you might expect.  The answer is CO2.  But let me explain a bit first.  Okay we know that stuff dissolves into other stuff (like sugar into water, water being the solvent).  If you’ve cooked at all you know that sugar, salt, and similar things … heck most things … dissolve (or go into solution) better/faster as you increase the temperature.  It’s just one of those molecular things.  CO2 is different.  CO2 dissolves better as it gets, wait for it, colder.  Yes, colder.  So, warm …read more

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We all knew that mosquitoes are out for blood (the female ones at least), but did you know that they also have a huge sweet tooth?  Yep.  They need nectar and sugar as food (the blood is for egg production and laying).  So some Israeli scientists have found that a sugar solution laced with insecticide is particularly effective and killing the little buggers.  Mosquito comes to lap up some sugar and well, that’s all she wrote.
While I think this is cool and interesting, I’m not a huge fan of insecticides.  I wish they had found a way to spike the …read more

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Fox News is reporting (and not in an unbiased way BTW) that a recently published study correlates cosmic ray output from the Sun to the formation of lower atmosphere clouds.  Lower atmosphere clouds are the ones that have a significant effect on the warming and cooling of the planet.  Okay.  So the study found that lower cosmic ray emissions, less cloud cover, less cloud cover warmer Earth.  Okay.  Now since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we’ve had rising temperatures and lower cosmic ray input.  So is it only the Sun responsible for Global Warming?
Frankly I don’t know.  Sounds like …read more

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Sometimes when you’re blogging you write a post that yeah, you think is pretty good, but others to do and that is pretty cool.  My post from yesterday about using PocketMods are quick and easy fieldbooks seems to strike a chord with folks (and if you really liked it, please Digg it).  You readers also seem to like my posts where I talk about science with kids (like when T and I saw the raptors) so I’m going to do more of that.
I’m going to have to dig deep into my library of books to find my cool kid-friendly experiments …read more

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