Bats, along with spiders and snakes, are one of the most frequently feared animals. Ask any bat lover, and they will tell you that these creatures are harmless and unfairly maligned. Sure they carry rabies, but so do many other animals, including “man’s best friend” the dog. People’s phobias, they maintain, comes from the medieval […]

You know how you sometimes pick at a scab? Or probe a sore spot over and over? Or take a second or third look at that picture of the infected wound in your textbook? You just can’t help yourself. And that’s why you’ll click on the link at the end of this blog. Scientists at […]

Human beings, it seems, have always been interested in their innards. We view human interiors with a mixture of horror and fascination. Now technology (and some offbeat personalities) has made it possible for many people to see other honest-to-goodness human bodies with the hood wide open. In the early days of anatomical drawings, bodies were […]

“Thermonuclear fusion” is a big phrase with big connotations. Related phrases that immediately come to mind include “the Sun” and “H-bomb”. For those following the field, “Tokamak” and “Shiva” might pop up. What about the word “benchtop”? Throwing this in instantly brings up the 80’s “cold fusion” fiasco. But some of the frontrunners in the […]

Philip Glass is one of the few “serious” composers that you may have heard of. You haven’t? Well, consider this your introduction. Mr. Glass is the founding father of a musical movement called “minimalism”. His music is some of the most listenable of modern compostions, which generally sound like they were designed to offend the […]

On the Fourth of July 2005, NASA successfully executed what may be their coolest mission ever: to shoot the comet 9P/Tempel 1 with a camera-equipped cannonball. The aptly-named “Deep Impact” mission was far neater than the movie, because it was real. Officially, the main probe was the “flyby” and the projectile was the “impactor”. Released […]

Yep, hand-drawn holograms. No film or laser beams required. All you need is a hard, dark, reflective piece of plastic, a drawing compass, paper, and tape. The resulting images do indeed pop out in three-D. To get the feel of looking at the finished product, stare at this picture and cross your eyes. Note that […]

There’s been a lot of research findings about obesity in the past few decades, but this seems to be the weirdest yet: As reported in the August 2005 ASM News (from the American Society of Microbiology) and the January 2005 International Journal of Obesity, some think that you can get fat by catching the fat […]

Forget those hand-cranked radios. Forget pocketfuls of heavy D-cells. And especially forget those nifty Faraday-effect survival flashlights—you know, the ones you have to shake back and forth until you have carpal tunnel syndrome and it starts to look vaguely obscene. The ultimate human-powered camping gadget is here—the backpack generator. For years, researchers have tried to […]

Ask any astronomer if she’d like a perfectly parabolic six-meter-diameter mirror at one-fiftieth the price, and she’ll be unable to answer for all the drooling. Yet, according to the journal Science, the folks at the Alberta Canada Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) have accomplished exactly that. The secret? The mirror is 30 liters of rotating mercury. […]