In our last article, we left off with the race to understand the molecular basis of heredity. Protein molecules were thought to be complex enough to encode genetic information, but no one could quite figure out how that information could be copied and passed on from cell to cell. DNA was a big enough molecule, […]
Category: Science Literacy
Article #16: DNA, The Recipe for Life
Well, the story of water is over, for now. Water will come up again, over and over, as we get into other topics, because—well, like you should know by now, water is really important in a lot of different ways. But for now, we’ll start looking into some other stuff. Let’s talk about DNA. DNA […]
Article #15: We are All One, and One with the Stars
When I was little, I was there for what was, basically, the beginning of science in the popular media. I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday–watching Jacques Cousteau’s TV specials on the “Undersea World” and Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom and, maybe best of all, the Apollo Moon landings. In a world that […]
Article #14: Water and the Secret to Life on Earth
For those of you who have read the remarkably funny books by Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you know that the answer to the ultimate question about the secret to “life, the universe and everything”, is “42”. However, there are a few other details that might also matter to the secret of […]
Article #13: You Like the Beach Because Water is Sticky. Who Knew?
So, in the last article, things probably got a little dense as we continued to journey through the wonderful world of chemical bonds and how that pertains to what makes water such a big deal. Sorry about that, but it had to be done. Chemical bonds and the making and breaking of them are just […]
Article #12: Why is Water Different?
In the last article, we went over some of the physical characteristics of water and why too much of it is not good. In the process, we built a little on our understanding of potential and kinetic energy. This time, let’s get a little bit into why water is such a big deal that NASA […]
Article 11: Water, Water, Everywhere
Let’s start talking about water. Nobody really thinks much about water unless there is too much of it or not enough. Let’s look at too much water first. We’ve all seen the pictures and videos of tsunamis washing over an island or of floods rushing down a valley, relentlessly smashing and washing away everything in […]
Article #10: Energy is the Reason for Everything
So far, in this series of articles on scientific literacy, we’ve touched on scale, mass, gravity, atoms, molecules, chemical bonds and Fritz Haber, with the occasional tangent into other things. The purpose to all of this is to help people learn enough science to be able to understand public issues that are related to science […]
Article #9: Atoms into Molecules
Most of the articles I’ve posted, so far, have had something to do with basic chemistry, like what is an atom, an element, or a molecule? Why is nitrogen such a big deal? And so on. We’ve started out this way because, if we’re working to develop a basic understanding of science, we have to […]
Article #8: All the Stuff There Is
Everything that is, is matter. We touched on this a bit before, but I think we need to hang some more meat on those bones before we go much further into our scientific journey. Understanding, like science itself, needs to build up from a firm foundation in basic principles. The simple definition is that matter […]