Category: Science Literacy

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In my previous article, we went over one of the reasons why Nitrogen is so important (living organisms have to have it to make proteins to live and grow) and where most of the “extra” usable Nitrogen can be found (animal waste).  There is, however, another, extremely important, piece to the equation of why Nitrogen […]

Every living thing requires Nitrogen to live.  Nitrogen (a gaseous element with the atomic symbol of N) is an essential part of every protein molecule, and proteins are essential to the structure and function of all organisms.  All organisms get the nitrogen they need to make their proteins from the environment.  Some organisms, like animals, […]

One of the reasons I feel so passionately about the importance of scientific literacy for EVERYBODY is that there are a great many important issues related to science that are impacting our world every single day and affecting our futures, every single day.  Some of those issues are relatively small things like, for instance, a […]