Some of my earliest memories are of having my foot measured at a shoe store in suburban New Jersey. I’m a little unclear as to why this memory is so vivid, but it might have something to do with those visits also being paired with a soft pretzel. I can still remember my mother scraping comically large salt grains into the trash before I could get a bite of strip-mall, de-salted pretzel. Salt wasn’t something I was allowed to have much of as a kid, so opportunities didn’t come along often. While most of that salty goodness ended up in the Meadowlands, the residual salt was more than enough to keep me happy before my mother needed to duck into Macy’s to discover the latest that early-1990s office-core had to offer.
Continue readingHistory
The Politics of Poop
In the 19th century, a healthy fraction of the worlds attention revolved around poop. More specifically, bird turd islands.
From a modern frame of reference, this certainly raises a few questions:
- Were people in the 19th century ok?
Probably not. - Will bird poop raise my car’s resale value?
No. - Should I be investing in guano instead of gold?
This blog does not give investment advice.
So what gives, why the poop obsession?
Continue readingBlondlot’s Folly: The Science of Seeing Things
In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot announced something extraordinary: a brand-new form of radiation he called “N-rays” after his home base at Nancy University. According to Blondlot, these mystery rays could make a barely visible spark a little bit brighter.
Soon, French labs were identifying N-rays everywhere. Possible sources of N-rays included:
- A specialized gas burner called a WeIsbach mantle
- An incandescent lamp called a Nernst glower
- Heated silver and sheet iron
- The sun
- Living and dead bodies
- Nerves
- Muscles
- Isolated enzymes
This list of sources remains so broad and varied one starts to wonder what couldn’t produce N-rays. The only limitation seemed to be imagination. By 1906, nearly 300 articles had been published on the topic. There was one small issue standing between Blondlot and immortality in Halliday and Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics: N-rays don’t actually exist.
Continue readingUranium: The Brightest Bad Idea in Diabetes Care
The use of radioactive compounds as medicines is starting to have it’s moment in the sun. Currently over 60 of these radiopharmaceuticals are approved worldwide, primarily for the purpose of diagnosing and treating cancer. Billion dollar acquisitions have a funny way of getting investors excited, though the specialized nature of these compounds leaves many companies struggling to fill a “significant talent shortage.” Of course, the story of radioactivity in medicine didn’t begin with billion-dollar deals, it began with the curious case of uranium.
Our story begins in 1789, when the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth decided to take a deeper look at what was essentially mining waste. A self taught expert in mineral analysis, Klaproth was busy doing analytical chemistry before it was cool. The hipsters among us may know him for his work on zirconium, but his early work on uranium is definitely one of his greatest hits. Klaproth had started some early work on the mineral torbernite, but eventually switched to working on a mineral that gold and silver miners knew well: pitchblende. This black substance typically meant that the gold and silver had been exhausted and that it was time to move elsewhere.
Continue readingNo one ever expects an immaculate conception.
A friend of mine recently confessed to me that he preferred to think of himself as a virgin birth. When I asked why, he said he likes to think that his parents never had sex. I have no idea where he thinks he got his Y chromosome from, as his mother has only the two Xs, but I suppose invoking miracles to do away with inconvenient thoughts is hardly something he invented. Much like industrial meat production and the effectiveness of sneeze guards at salad bars, the topic of parental sex is one item we would probably rather leave unexamined.
Some organisms don’t need to avoid this topic, Continue reading
Try to stay still for your bone portrait.
I was recently at the dentist for a check-up and they had a chart on the wall, kind of like this one here. In short it tells you how much radiation you’re exposed to when you engage in different activities. For example flying from New York to Los Angeles exposes you to about the same amount of radiation as eight dental X-rays. Believe it or not, flying exposes you to an increased amount of radiation coming from space. A single flight across the ocean is no big deal but long-term elevated radiation exposure can increase your risk of some kinds of cancer, and it’s why workers that are exposed to elevated levels of things like X-rays are monitored to make sure exposure is kept to a minimum.
It got me thinking, while I listened to the slow and steady suction of spit from my oral cavity, “I wonder if Lois Lane, would have to wear a radiation safety badge?” I am totally unsure about the radiation output Continue reading
Wasting away on a full stomach.
There are some things humans do better than bacteria. We, generally, are better at writing novels and constructing screenplays. That said some individuals are only marginally better at communicating their needs to others. Some bacteria communicate quite effectively chemically, while some people may not have such a record for clarity.
There is one area bacteria, such as E. coli and Bacillus subtilis, indisputably have us beat and that is in metabolism. These organisms can take a few simple salts, a carbon source (sugar), and just a few trace metals on the glass wear and readily grow. You or I … not so much. Though I’m sure if you carbonate that mixture and ad caffeine it would probably make a simply disgusting energy drink. You could market it as “Basal Media: It’s got what bacteria crave.”
Continue readingMy elephant’s drug dealer.
I’ve never done LSD. It’s not that I haven’t had the time, it’s just I’ve never really had a desire to have hallucinations. I have enough trouble keeping track of what size bed sheets I need to buy. I am pretty sure auditory and visual hallucinations would just induce me to buy extra king sized sheets for my queen sized bed.
Despite my reluctance, there is definitely a market for psychedelic drugs. There is even a recent trend to write articles about how taking low doses of LSD might enhance work performance, make you more creative, and save your marriage. To be perfectly honest Continue reading
Looking for life in all the wrong places.
Being boiled alive has never seemed like an exciting activity to me. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good cup of boiled water (tea leaves preferably included) I would just rather not be immersed in it. It has a remarkably negative impact on human life expectancy, because we just aren’t built to withstand temperatures of 212ºF (100ºC). I’ve also got to believe, that awareness of the safety hazard of very hot substances, is far from a recent development. One has to imagine that shortly after fire was discovered, some one to two million years ago, that it was followed by the discovery of stop, drop, and roll.
Boiling bacteria on the other hand, was a largely unconsidered endeavour until much later. Antonie von Leeuwenhoek learned that such things existed back in the late 1600’s when he was busy Continue reading
The Retro Scientist 
