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, […]
Tag: science literacy
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 #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 #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 […]