(38) results in Blog
June 1, 2015
What is the Acceptable (and Ethical) Role of the Scientist in Society?
This past week marked the 108th birthday of marine biologist Rachel Carson, probably most widely known for her groundbreaking book Silent Spring (1962), which sparked a grassroots environmental movement in the United States and led to...
May 20, 2015
Fighting Skin Cancer with Vitamin B3
May is National Skin Cancer Awareness Month, so what better time to announce the results of a promising new study by Australian researchers: An inexpensive vitamin pill reduced new occurrences of the most common types of...
May 11, 2015
Did Neanderthals Divide Labor by Gender Roles?
Cross-posted with the permission of Dr. Nathan Lents from his The Human Evolution Blog. It is not uncommon among social mammals to engage in division of labor between the sexes. Female lions do all of the...
April 8, 2015
MRSA meets its medieval match
In his 1945 Nobel Prize speech, Alexander Fleming warned that misusing antibiotics would lead to resistance in microbes. Fast forward 70 years and zoom in on MRSA: It’s contagious, it’s dangerous, and it resists the antibiotics...
April 6, 2015
Bugs to Dye for: The Colorful Science and History of Cochineal
What gives that red hue to your strawberry yogurt or the pinkish tint to the vitamin tablet you take every morning? It just might come from an insect. For hundreds of years, a small, parasitic bug...
March 19, 2015
The ecological jewel to our south: Environmental implications of normalized U.S.-Cuba relations
Satellite view of Cuba ©NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio The Obama Administration’s announced change in diplomatic relations with Cuba heralds the start of a new relationship between the Caribbean island nation and the U.S. Though...
March 12, 2015
Writing to Learn in the Science Classroom
Education in the United States, particularly in the K through 12 arena, has been a hotbed of public debate in the last decade, heating up more recently in controversies surrounding Common Core. While few would argue...
March 6, 2015
A stunning week of #SciArt draws to a close
This week, Scientific American’s Symbiartic blog decided to try something new: they asked Twitter users to tweet pictures of scientific art — from spectacular satellite photos to science-inspired quilts — accompanied by the hashtag #SciArt. The...
January 20, 2015
Copper shines in fight against germs
From centuries-old time capsules to modern medical centers, copper shines as the metal of choice to preserve and protect. Case in point: A time capsule first buried in 1795 by Paul Revere and Samuel Adams was...
January 9, 2015
Nicolaus Steno: An Unlikely Geology Genius
Portrait of Nicolaus Steno as a bishop. Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons Nicolaus Steno could not have guessed that he would one day be known as a father of modern geology on the fateful day in October...
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