What do you get if you cross a parrot with a centipede? Take a moment…A walkie-talkie! Yes, as anyone with a kindergartener knows, the old jokes really are the best. But when it comes to crossing one animal with another – also known as hybridization – it’s time to get serious. Although the idea of […]
Back in 2011, a ‘wild card’ movie based on The Dark Fields, a science fiction novel by Alan Glynn, hit the box office to unexpected success. Grossing more than $160 million on a slender $27 million budget and starring Hollywood icons Robert De Niro and Bradley Cooper, the narrative follows writer Eddie Morra as he […]
Can we have a show of hands for those whose oral health is such that they have never had a cavity, a crown, a root canal, or an extraction? Hmm….not seeing many hands going up right now. And that’s not surprising. Few of us are fortunate enough to avoid the excruciating anxiety of that long […]
From way back in the Stone Age to our current Silicon Age, we have labeled periods of our development as a species by the materials we have come to master: stone, bronze, iron, and so on.(1) And, at each stage, our adoption of nature’s materials has also brought with it the development of other consumables […]
From the perfect Super Venti Flat White (yes, it is ‘a thing’) crafted for us at the Starbucks drive-thru to the tailored Tesla designed to indulge our most whimsical aesthetic consideration, the world is becoming increasingly customized whether we like it or not. And however we perceive this transition – good, bad, or indifferent – […]
Near to an abandoned Mayan temple in the steamy jungles of Guatemala, camouflaged beneath a matrix of overgrown vine and lianas, nestles a small medical clinic catering to the needs of, at most, a handful of patients. A private facility, not marked on any known map, the clinic is an important link in the supply […]
When you hear the phrase ‘designer babies,’ what springs most readily to mind? It’s an emotionally, socially, and politically loaded term that’s come to represent much of what’s ethically questionable in genetic research. Perhaps we might think of the movie Gattaca (that we referenced last week) in which genetics equal destiny. Or the 2003 German […]
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 grandparents. Oh those halcyon days. Today, the landscape is so much more nuanced as advances in […]
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 body. Engaging with it as cartographers of an unexplored continent they staked their claims to its […]
Last year, we dipped our corporate toes into the pool of industry analysis, tentatively creating articles that we thought might be of interest to our customers, partners, and the broader contamination control community. We expected that only a handful of readers would return week after week to see what scientific curiosity had caught the eye […]
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