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Hydrogen sulfide stinks, but you knew that already, didn’t you. Hydrogen sulfide is flammable, but you probably knew that too (and I won’t ask how). But did you know hydrogen sulfide lowers blood pressure? and might protect the body from injury?
As little as 10 parts per million of hydrogen sulfide can irritate your […]
Author Archives: Justin Paul
Chest pains? Quick!! Pull my finger!!
July 16, 2008 – 8:00 am
The Tooth Fairy is from Norway?
July 9, 2008 – 8:00 am
curlyqcuties/flickr
Helene Meyer Tvinnereim and a team of Norwegian scientists are collecting milk teeth from 100,000 kids to create what may be the world’s largest tooth bank. A dental biomaterials researcher at U Bergen in Norway, Tvinnereim seeks to find links between diseases and prenatal/childhood exposure to chemicals. The normally discarded teeth function as […]
The incredible, edible..
July 2, 2008 – 8:00 am
Kagedfish/flickr
In the early 1940s, Esmond Emerson Snell (1914-2003) was trying to figure out why baby chicks who were fed raw egg whites (I know.. how cruel..) showed symptoms of biotin deficiency despite having plenty of it in the diet.
So who’s getting the biotin? Turned out the egg white itself just wouldn’t release the […]
One.. two.. skip a few..
June 30, 2008 – 4:00 pm
Hexadecimal Time/flickr
“Have you quantified that?”
Answering “no” to this question will usually trigger a collective humph from the crowd at a scientific meeting. We don’t want to know that there’s more or less of some biological activity unless you can say exactly how much different it is from normal.
Now Ron Milo, Paul Jorgensen and Mike […]
Individualism or Interdependence
May 23, 2008 – 6:00 am
During our show Who Am I? we got worried that spending so much time thinking about the ’self’ would make us a little.. well.. self-centered. But what’s wrong with that? Nothing really, but apparently we wouldn’t do well on this puzzle.
(Image: Keysar and Wu/Psychological Science)
The view on the left shows what the test […]
The focal point
May 19, 2008 – 11:55 am
If you do not see the video please install the latest flash player.
Fluorescent microscopy can illuminate neurons genetically engineered to express fluorescent proteins. “Two-photon” microscopy is special because it lights up the fluorescent neurons only at the focal point allowing scientists to piece together multiple sections in order to obtain a 3D image.
So how does this “two-photon” technology produce […]
Biological voyeurism
May 14, 2008 – 11:00 am
Scientists communicate with pictures (graphs, images, flowcharts, etc) because it’s often impossible to convey experimental results with just words. So a picture is truly worth a thousand words, right?
I checked this out by dividing the total words by the number of figure panels in a few recent Reports to Science and Letters to Nature. […]
Lies are only skin deep?
May 9, 2008 – 2:00 pm
Pancrat/flickr
Over the course of human history, the methods used to determine if someone is telling the truth have ranged from horrific to downright silly. The legend of La Bocca della Verita holds that if someone fibs with their hand in the mouth, it gets bitten off.
More recent research looks at brain activity during […]
Technology and Human Rights
May 9, 2008 – 1:53 pm
Many of you probably remember last year’s release of satellite images documenting human rights violations in Myanmar (Burma). Scientists have teamed together at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to use sophisticated technology to alert us of the atrocities against civilians in Darfur, North Korea, and Burma. How else can […]
A formula for the perfect joke
May 5, 2008 – 6:28 am
Firstposter Showcase/flickr
In our research on the show Laughter, we came across Dr. Helen Pilcher’s formula for writing hit British comedy.
x = (fl + no ) / p
where funniness (f) of the punchline times length of build-up (l) is added to the amount someone falls down (n) times the physical pain or social embarrassment […]