Homely Scientist

Carbon-14 has to be one of my favourite isotopes.  Yeah, it’s geeky, but the discovery of C14 lead to radiocarbon (C14) dating.  This has allowed us to know (roughly) how old something is.  One thing not really discussed in the media is that a C14 date is in radiocarbon years.  Not calendar years.  They differ from calendar year anywhere from a few hundred years to a few thousand.  Yeah, that’s a lot.  So when we report dates in papers we stick to reporting radiocarbon years and then give an estimated corrected date.  The estimated date even changes as the technique …read more

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Hsien sent me a link to Science With Me a little while ago, I didn’t have a chance to blog it until now, but she did!  Anyway, it’s a cool site with a free membership so you and your kids can learn about static electricity (which I had my own run it with today) and fingerprints.  Everything seems to be written in nice, kid-friendly language and the experiments are short and easy (maybe messy too!).
Looks like I know what I’ll be doing this weekend with the kids!  Oh, what to choose, what to choose…
Technorati tags: kid science, science education, experiments …read more

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I’m a big supporter of alternative fuels for vehicles.  I’ve tried biodiesel for an old car I had.  I’d use ethanol fuel if I could get it.  One of the big potential fuel sources is methane.  Easy to make, heck our landfills already make tons of it.  Problem has been that methane needs to be kept at high P.S.I. to be useable and that means huge tanks with think walls.  Not very practical for your average (or any) car.  That may have changed:
Midwest Research Institute in Kansas City have devised a way to change all that, however, by using corncob …read more

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No, I don’t mean that.  What I mean is, are you taking enough of your medication for it to work properly?  Of course, you need to take your medication as prescribed.  Don’t even think about not doing that.  I learned something, though, yesterday about one of my medications.  As you know I suffer from depression and take medication for it.  I recently switched to a new one and it was working okay.  Not great, just okay.  I went in, chatted with the doctor and he upped the dose a bit.  Within a day or two I felt a huge improvement …read more

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To bodly go where no one has gone before … a five year mission …   Okay let’s stop there.  Five year mission!  Yikes!  As NASA is working on getting back on the Moon and establishing a colony there, Mars is in their sights too.  Sending people to Mars.  The dream of many young, potential space traveller (and some older ones too).  Turns out that (with current propulsion technology) the six month trip out, time there, and time back NASA is pretty concerned about how the astronauts themselves will fair.  From the Discovery Channel News…
Anxiety, loneliness and tensions with crewmates, a daily …read more

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I love it when some new key to the past is found.  Recently NPR talked about an Ice Age era cave discovered in Missouri.
The cave itself is interesting, but it was what was found inside that really makes the find unique. Apparently a whole host of vertebrate and invertebrate fossils have been found. Some of the finds are of turtles (the common box turtle as well as an older, unknown species believed to be ancestral to the box turtle), snakes, rodent tracks, peccary (important because previously it was believed that peccary only entered caves when they were carried in by …read more

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From Engadget:
It works by processing images from the camera and wirelessly transmitting them to a receiver implanted in the eye, which in turn sends signals to a series of electrodes that stimulate the retina, sending the information to the brain, all of which happens in real time. While it won’t restore full sight, the researchers say patients should be able to detect light and distinguish objects from one another. Source: Researchers set to test bionic eye implant – Engadget
While not a complete cure, this combination of a camera and neural connections to the retina itself, has been shown to …read more

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Raise your hand if you like to get injections.  Okay, you go get some help.  Doesn’t matter why you need to have an injection, it hurts.  Transdermal injection systems are being worked on all over the place, but here’s an interesting one:
NanoPass Technologies is working to develop its “proprietary intradermal drug delivery technology,” which supposedly deliver injections without the painful side effects by actually not reaching the nerve endings of the skin. Based on MicroPyramids, which are manufactured by MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems), the pure silicone crystals are used in extremely diminutive microneedles for intradermal injections, and the tip of the …read more

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 Again thanks to Laura for this site.  If you’ve ever wanted to know what non-food bits are allowed in food (we’re talking insect parts, rodent hairs, mold, etc) then check out the US FDA/CFSAN Defect Action Level Handbook.
Okay it is gross.  Kinda scary too.  File under: “OMG I can’t believe I eat that“.  You’ve been warned.
Technorati tags: food safety, food contaminants

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How many of you have gone to make a sandwich and saw a mold spot on a slice or two, and just pitched those and used the “mold free” slices?  Yeah me too.  Ever felt kinda “off” later?  Ditto.  Why?  I didn’t eat the moldy pieces?  Well, the mold you see on the surface is just the “flower”, the fruiting body, the part that is spreading more mold spores around, the rest of the mold is actually throughout the rest of the bread (or what ever).  Mold spreads through an entire host to draw nutrients from it, so even though …read more

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