By Frank Moher Updated below I travelled to a local health food store on Monday and bought some kelp tablets. I was actually after potassium iodide, but they were already sold out. I am not naturally a health food store habitué — as I write this, I’m finishing up a Teen Burger meal — but […]
science
Jet pack? NOT!
By Eric Pettifor Where is my jet pack? It has been the future now for at least 10 years, or so it seems from the perspective of someone who was alive when men landed on the moon for the first time. Some might say that was the beginning of the future. After all the 1958 […]
Holograms: not quite there
Viewers of CNN might have been reminded of Star Wars when Wolf Blitzer spoke to a hologram of correspondent Jessica Yellin on election night. Unfortunately, this was a bit of a cheat, since from Mr. Blitzer’s perspective nothing was there — just special effects. This is not to dismiss altogether CNN’s technical achievement. Even if […]
Doomsday Postponed
The Earth has received a stay of execution due to the failure of some really big superconducting magnets at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Any of you who were concerned that the collision of high energy particles at the LHC would produce a black hole to swallow the earth, including the fine people at lhcdefense.org, […]
Life on Mars?
Some time ago I posted about the arrival of NASA’s Phoenix Lander on Mars. I noted that the initial images were essentially a postcard letting us know that it had arrived on the red planet and was getting ready to do some work. One of the primary objectives of the mission was to explore the […]
Taken with a grain of salt
By Eric Pettifor This week we’ll be considering the element known as sodium. What is sodium? Some might say “Sodium is that which makes salt bad for us,” which would be a mis-characterization born of the fact that we get altogether more salt than we need, largely because of its ubiquity in processed foods. In […]
The Phoenix has landed
The really interesting tech news at the moment is that the Phoenix lander has landed on Mars. They aimed the thing at the planet, it travelled through space, entered the Martian atmosphere, deployed a parachute to slow its descent, and landed where they wanted it to land. All that is in itself amazing, since so […]
Collision Course Earth
Let’s face it, we’re sitting ducks. The planet has a huge bullseye painted on it just waiting for a giant asteroid to hit the target. But rather than get a breeding population of people and a library of all our history and achievements the hell off the planet, we have apparently decided that manned space […]
Racists take note
On March 21, 1960 in Sharpeville, South Africa, police opened fire on a group of protestors, injuring somewhere between 150 and 300 people and killing 69 others. The demonstrators were protesting apartheid, a legalized system of racial classification and segregation. Enforced by the South African government, inhabitants were classified into racial groups, with black South […]
Of lights and lasers
Now that I’ve just about completely replaced all incandescent lights in my apartment with compact fluorescents (CFL), GE has announced a new, improved, more energy efficient incandescent. Eventually, they say, it’ll be better than CFL. What’s up with that, and why didn’t they do it sooner? The press release doesn’t say, and I won’t speculate […]
