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 […]
Category: Science
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 […]
Article #7: The Most Important Person You’ve Never Heard Of-Part 2
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 […]
Article #6: Nitrogen and the most important person you’ve never heard of, Part 1
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, […]