The Smart Paint Patrol
The U.S. military has launched an offensive against one of its most stubborn enemies — rust. The Army spends $10 billion a year dealing with it. Scraping and repainting is not only expensive, it...
View ArticleDodge’s 4-wheel Tomahawk
It was all for power. The Tomahawk’s designers were so bent on making a brutally powerful motorcycle that they were forced to mutate most of the bike’s components to accommodate the massive V10 Viper...
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D&D Co-creator Gary Gygax Dies
E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has rolled his last d20. He was 69. I could go on and on about the impact D&D had on multiple generations of geeks, freaks and nerds, or...
View ArticleNobel Prize Winner Retracts Paper
For scientists, having to retract a paper is like a kick to the gut. It means that your work cannot be verified, and thus is likely either 1) an error or 2) a fabrication. So it comes as something of...
View ArticleAuthor Arthur C. Clarke Dead at 90
March 2008 has been a rough month for nerds. First came the passing of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax. Now we hear that one of the mightiest names in science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke, has died....
View ArticleBrilliant 10: Ian Spielman, the Control Freak
This year’s Brilliant 10 honorees join the illustrious ranks of Marie Curie, Werner Heisenberg, Francis Crick and James Watson in proving that youth isn’t always wasted on the young. Whether by virtue...
View ArticleHow We Determined the Ten Biggest Science Projects
Before we started trying to figure out which big science projects are actually the biggest science projects in the world, we had to put down a few parameters. First, the projects had to be up and...
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A Personal Beer Brewery That Spouts Pro-Quality Suds In A Week
Most beer drinkers don’t have the time (or inclination) to muddle through the painstaking home-brewing process, but the WilliamsWarn Personal Brewery simplifies just about everything. The brewing...
View ArticleRemembering Ray Bradbury, 1920-2012
Web editor Paul Adams ruined my morning by walking over to my desk to inform me that Ray Bradbury had died at age 91. The news was unpleasant, but I appreciated the face-to-face exchange rather than...
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New York’s Newest Bookstore, Singularity&Co., Brings Sci-Fi Back From the Dead
Much of the oldest and best science fiction stories and novels are, sadly, long out of print. The only way to read them is to dig through second-hand bookshops, rummage sales, or dusty attics, or hope...
View ArticleMost Retracted Scientific Papers Are Pulled Due To Fraud
It feels like not a week goes by without a scientific paper getting retracted. The article authors issue apologetic statements of “mistaken” data or “submitted the wrong photo” or whatever, and...
View ArticleBeerSci: What Running Marathons Can Teach You About Beer
The United States has an estimated 1 million homebrewers, according to the American Homebrewers Association. That’s just slightly under the estimated number of nutjobs in the U.S. who have run a...
View ArticleRemember When The Nobels Used To Be Inspiring?
This is usually one of the best weeks of the year for me: Nobel week, when a select group of scientists are publicly lauded for their research and awarded a medal, some bragging rights for the faculty...
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BeerSci: How To Brew A Beer For Surviving A Marathon, The Holidays Or...
A “mild” is a type of ale first produced in the 1700s in England. The term “mild” originated to mean a young beer (meant to be drunk fresh), as opposed to a beer that you could age for a while in the...
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BeerSci: What Beer’s Key Ingredient Reveals About Our Own Genomes
Meet Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the humble brewer’s yeast and resident co-deity to BeerSci’s brewing endeavors. Humans have been exploiting S. cerevisiae‘s fermentation prowess for thousands of years....
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The Dictionary Of Hurricane Sandy: Baroclinic Energy
Baroclinic Energy Noun. Pronunciation: [bar-uh-klin-ik] One of the most striking features of Sandy is its source of energy. Most tropical cyclones get their energy from convection of warm tropical air...
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BeerSci: What To Drink During A Hurricane
Team BeerSci is trapped at home with a few Zone A refugees and we’re contemplating how to pass the time as Hurricane Sandy approaches. It’s not a tough decision: we made sure to put plenty of homebrew...
View ArticleWhat Not To Do In A Huge Storm
I wish I could blame the following stupidity on booze, but I don’t even have that crutch. I’ll blame it instead on being cooped up in the house for hours on end watching horrible things unfold on the...
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BeerSci: Uncovering The Secrets Of Barley
Last month, scientists announced a big breakthrough in barley research: They had finally sequenced the entire barley genome. In response, some media outlets ran stories declaring that this will...
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BeerSci: How To Make Beer Foamier
A couple of weeks ago, scientists from Australia and Spain published a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in which they reported finding a gene (and characterized the transcribed...
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