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Challenge Accepted: Make Dinner From A Catalog Of Pharmaceutical Compounds
Pretty much every chemist worth his or her salt knows the Merck Index. First published in 1889, the Merck Index is an enormous compendium of chemicals, their physical properties and their industrial...
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Humanoid Robots Play Motorhead’s Ace of Spades
I love robots. I love Motorhead. And so it stands to reason that I would love robots playing Motorhead. But I haven’t actually been able to test that theory — until now, thanks to some roboticists in...
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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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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: Are Hops Addictive?
Modern-day hopheads–the beer drinkers who gleefully, obsessively seek out hoppier and hoppier brews–don’t usually start out that way. Most people have a natural aversion to bitter compounds–useful for...
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Shedding New Light On Basement Marijuana Technology
As of 2013, 24 states and Washington, DC, have either legalized marijuana or decriminalized possession of it. One of my friends lives in a state where medical marijuana is now legal, and he has taken...
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BeerSci: Is That Water In Your Pint Glass?
I was going to write about hops and the people who crave them this week, but got distracted by the unfolding drama around AB-InBev. The booze giant has had a crappy run over the last few weeks: First...
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BeerSci: Why You Should Never Drink Beer From A Clear Glass Bottle
The subject of Beer Gone Bad came up at the office the other day, and I gave my colleagues an impromptu lesson in why “skunking” in beer is very different from a lot of the other ways a beer can turn...
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 ArticleTheir Big Eyes May Have Caused Neanderthals’ Demise
Anyone stuck with glasses knows the envy of those with killer eyesight. But visual acuity apparently came at a price, at least for Neanderthals. According to a paper published in Proceedings of the...
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Oxford Institute Forecasts The Possible Doom Of Humanity
Most of us are content to just worry about the future of humanity in our spare time, but there’s an entire group of academics at Oxford University in England who make that their professional mission....
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A Virus That Steals A Bacterium’s Immune System And Uses It As A Weapon
Sometimes, I read a news item that pretty much overturns an entire class of pedagogy in my head. Take, for example, the discovery that virus particles steal and repurpose a bacteria’s immune system,...
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BeerSci: How To Drink Your Thanksgiving Meal
Ah, Thanksgiving. That gluttonous annual tribute to post-colonial greed. To celebrate, many of us are going to be drinking beer — a lot of it — before, during and after the main event. This helps one...
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BeerSci: How To Make Strong Beer Stronger
Team BeerSci was marooned in The Land of Always Winter (aka New Hampshire) for the Christmas holidays. I decided to take advantage of the absurd cold (it never got above freezing) and try an...
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Slow-Motion Video Of A Bridge Exploding Is The Best Way To Start The Week
Monday mornings pretty much always make me feel like blowing things up. So watching videos about things blowing up — or people blowing things up — seems to be a perfect way to ease into the work week....
View ArticleYou Can Hear When Trees Are Thirsty
Imagine you’re just polishing off a glass of soda. Whatever liquid left in the straw makes that gurgling sound indicative that there’s just nothing left in the glass to drink. Turns out, trees under...
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The science is clear: Metal music is good for you
TO THE UNINITIATED, metal music—especially its more extreme forms like death metal and grindcore—sounds like a melody penned by an angry caveman. It’s punishing, chaotic, brutal, aggressive,...
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What Snooty Beer Should I Drink? [Infographic]
Interested in beer, but are somewhat confused by all of the styles and technical jargon that encrusts the current craft movement? Computer science graduate student Kevin Jamieson has created an...
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The Science Behind 4 Of The Greatest Polymers Of All Time
Here at PopSci, we usually focus on the newest innovations in science and technology. But many past innovations in polymer science–the study of plastics and other similar materials–are still relevant...
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BeerSci: What’s The Connection Between Hops And Marijuana?
“Are hops and marijuana related?” I’ve fielded that question many times, usually after someone has sampled an especially resinous IPA — although at least one PopSci editor asked me the same question...
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What is the difference between a lager and an ale?
For the average beer drinker, the difference between an ale and a lager comes down to how the beer looks, smells, and tastes. Ales tend to be fruity-estery, while lagers are clean-tasting and...
View ArticleCaffeine-Addicted Bacteria Die If You Give Them Decaf
Caffeine. Like so many other wonderful compounds that provide a lift, buzz, high or other pleasant side effect, caffeine under certain circumstances is toxic. It’s most certainly poisonous to humans...
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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: How Beer Gets Its Color
Before you read this column, I urge you to pop open a belated birthday beer. Pour that beer into a clear glass (pint or tulip, your choice), hold it up to the light, and take a good look at the color....
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Why Your Music Files Sound Like Crap
Those music files — be they MP3, AAC or WMA — that you listen to on your portable music players are pretty crap when it comes to accurate sound reproduction from the original recording. But just how...
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Journal Editors Have A Sense Of Humor!
The covers of scientific journals are usually staid, snooze-worthy affairs. But every now and again, one displays a sense of humor. Take, for instance, the March 19, 2013 issue of Biophysical Journal....
View ArticleResearchers Rearrange Nuts In Low Gravity
You may or may not have heard of the Brazil nut effect, but you’ve probably experienced it: open up a can of mixed nuts (or box of muesli, or any other heterogenous mixture of differently sized...
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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Does Edible Deodorant Work?
The makers of Deo Perfume Candy claim that if you eat a few of their pink lozenges, the odor compounds contained therein will travel through your body and start oozing out of your pores, giving you a...
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BeerSci: Want To Wet-Hop Your Beer? Grow Your Own Fresh Hops
A couple of months ago, a colleague asked me if one could grow one’s own hops. The answer is an emphatic YES. If you have some space outdoors and something that’s tall enough to let the hop plants...
View ArticleCthulhu Lives In The Gut Of A Termite
Scientists have been naming species after famous people for a long time. For example, Thomas Jefferson has an extinct giant ground sloth named after him. Mark Knopfler rates a dinosaur. Frank Zappa...
View ArticleBogus Academic Conferences Lure Scientists
If you build it, they will come. And someone, somewhere, is going to try to scam some money out of it. The “it” in this case is open-access journal publishing. Open-access means that anyone can read...
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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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...
View ArticleXKCD Presents: The Up Goer Five
One of the biggest hurdles to understanding any technical field is mastering the bewildering array of specialty words and terms. We at PopSci try very hard every day to take a difficult, jargon-larded...
View ArticleDid A Comet Kill The Dinosaurs?
Some 66 million years ago, a giant space object of some kind slammed into Earth right around the Yucatan peninsula. The resultant explosion sent debris high into the atmosphere; the dust resettled to...
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Who Or What Left This 60,000-Ton Ancient Artifact Under The Sea?
Put on your tin-foil hats and special anti-Illuminati underwear. A recently discovered mysterious ancient rock structure under the Sea of Galilee, possibly built in the same era as Stonehenge, has...
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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...
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Daily Infographic, Beer Edition: The Beer Flavor And Aroma Wheel
Flavor wheels — a visual depiction of the varieties of flavors or aromas that a particular substance might display — has a long, if somewhat gnarly history. For centuries, physicians used a urine...
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BeerSci: The Art And Science Of Beer Brewing, On Video
If you’ve never brewed a beer before, the entire process can come across and alien and incomprehensible, especially when some well-meaning home-brewer starts throwing unfamiliar words around. “Wort.”...
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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...
View ArticleNew Research Sheds Light On How Dogs Became Dogs
At first blush, the emergence of man’s best friend is pretty straightforward. The first dogs descended from wolves in Europe about 14,000 years ago. Then humans domesticated those proto-dogs until the...
View ArticleThere Used To Be Freaking Camels In The Arctic
North America was a crazy place a few million years ago. The megafauna alone would make the world’s most awesome zoo collection: giant sloths! Mastodons! Nine-foot saber-toothed salmon! Dire wolves!...
View ArticleAle Yeast Running For Official State Microbe Of Oregon
Oregon lawmakers in the House just voted 58-0 to approve its new state microbe. If the state Senate also approves, Oregon will boast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the humble ale yeast, as its unicellular...
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How Giant Concrete Balls Could Make Wind Power More Efficient
Wind power is pretty great: One doesn’t need to do much but build turbines and capture the energy from a passing breeze. But, like what happened to the Ancient Mariner, still air means trouble....
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BeerSci: How Do We Measure The Bitterness Of Beer?
A few weeks ago, Team BeerSci got the chance to tour one of our favorite breweries: Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown, PA. While there, we spent a fair amount of time in the lab with Victory’s...
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Whoa: Early American Settlers Ate Each Other
The winter of 1609-1610 was a pretty horrible time to be a resident of Jamestown, the early English settlement in what is now coastal Virginia. How horrible? Aside from the rampant disease, the...
View ArticleHow to brew beer at home in a week
In these times of social distancing, we’re all looking for ways to fill up our calendars. Making delicious beer is one option—and it doesn’t even have to take weeks, months, or days. We poked around...
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 ArticleWait, Is There Life In Lake Vostok? Researcher Still Says Yes
We never expected this particular saga to go smoothly, and so the latest tit-for-tat over Lake Vostok and its possible Brand New Lifeforms is depressingly familiar. A quick primer: Lake Vostok is a...
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