History

The Kids Are (Mostly) All Right… It’s The Adults I Worry About

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 4 Comments

My social algorithm may be broken. Lately I’ve been seeing a flood of sentimental posts lamenting how “kids these days” wouldn’t survive back in my day. Depending on the author, “my day” ranges anywhere from the 1950s to the 1990s, but the punchline is always the same: We were tough. Today’s kids are soft.

Those posts got me thinking about my own childhood in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One photo in particular comes to mind, taken when I was maybe three or five years old. We didn’t have a pool, so in the heat of a Northeastern summer, my parents would fill a five-gallon bucket with water and plop me in. Submerged up to my neck, surveying the backyard from my makeshift infinity pool, I felt like I was living in peak suburban luxury.

Continue reading →

Soft Pretzels and the Quantified Life

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 2 Comments

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 reading →

The Turn-On Test

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

The topic of sex remains a taboo in some corners of society, but evidence of our interest in sex abounds:

Continue reading →

The Politics of Poop

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 3 Comments

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:

  1. Were people in the 19th century ok?
    Probably not.
  2. Will bird poop raise my car’s resale value?
    No.
  3. Should I be investing in guano instead of gold?
    This blog does not give investment advice.

So what gives, why the poop obsession?

Continue reading →

Blondlot’s Folly: The Science of Seeing Things

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

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 reading →

Uranium: The Brightest Bad Idea in Diabetes Care

/ Andrew Tanner, PhD / 1 Comment

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 reading →