The subject of electromagnetic radiation has come up several times in previous articles, so we should probably spend a little time on it. We are bathed in invisible waves of all kinds, pretty much all the time. If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Matrix”, in the part at the end where Neo gets up […]
Tag: education
Article #20: Why All the Fuss Over Climate Change?
The simple answer to that question is because it’s really important. But simple answers are rarely complete ones. A more complete answer might be that global warming is important to lots of different people for lots of different reasons. There is a boatload of information out there in the media all the time about global […]
Article #19: Fall Colors: What Lies Beneath the Show
I love the fall. It’s my favorite season. I love sweatshirts and campfires. I love having the windows open. I love breathing cold, crisp air again after practically drowning in humidity with every breath in the summer. I love the feeling of change. And the leaves are nice, too. Apparently, some of you think the […]
Article #18: Carbon Dating: A Window Into the Past
Someone asked me a question about carbon dating, and since most of us have probably come across the term at some point and since the idea of carbon dating has fascinated me from the first time I read about it when I was a kid, it seems like a dandy topic for an article. So, […]
Article #17: The Beauty of DNA and my Brush with Greatness
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, […]
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 #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 […]