In 1941, John Gillespie Magee, Jr., a fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, was killed in a mid-air collision over the bucholic hamlet of Roxholme, England. Practicing maneuvers in his Spitfire VZ-H, an aircraft he’d flown in … Read More
Almost two years ago, we wrote a short article on the FDA regulation of a nascent industry, one that has the FDA sounding the alarm regarding contamination from carcinogens and the vaporizing of metal nanoparticles. Despite our concerns – … Read More
In the Worlds Fair Exposition of 1893, one young entrepreneur, Clark Stanley, stood before an excited crowd of onlookers and plunged his hand into a sack of live rattlesnakes. Pulling out an unfortunate herpetological victim, he sliced it open … Read More
It’s an open secret that scientists tend to have a love-hate relationship with fiction. Not all fiction – less so the bodice-rippers or cozy thrillers that spill off the bookstore shelves – but one specific genre: science fiction. Sometimes … Read More
Reproduction used to be simple. Boy meets girl. Egg meets sperm. Nine months, one baby shower, and a whole lot of trips to Buy Buy Baby later, a new addition arrives to much billing and cooing by the proud … Read More
We have a riddle for you: what is both ancient and futuristic, biodegradable and naturally sustainable, is delicately engineered in a cleanroom with a tensile strength five times that of steel, is a simple formulation but has applications in materials … Read More
Update: Now also featured on Cleanroom Technology
According to science writer Mary Roach in her eye-opening and entertaining book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, early anatomists had an almost child-like curiosity with the inner workings of the human … Read More
In his frequently hilarious and always engaging 2006 travelogue, Getting Stoned with Savages: A Trip Through the Islands of Fiji and Vanuatu, memoirist J. Maarten Troost describes his multi-year sojourn in a culture that kicks back after a long … Read More
Cats. Love them or loathe them, one thing is for sure: the Internet, that astounding creation that lays the sum of mankind’s knowledge, wisdom, experience, and expertise at the fingertips of anyone with even a dial-up modem, is chock … Read More
Throughout human history, we have maintained a conflicted relationship with our bodies. We don’t just mean the struggle to lose a pound or two, or the issues some of us face with physical dysfunction. It goes so much further … Read More