There is something fascinating about science.
One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

- Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
 

Scents Ability: The Science of the Senses - The first step in matching tastes and biochemicals is to isolate the aromatic fraction, generally done with a gas or liquid chromotograph and a mass spectrometer.  Aromatics show up as peaks on the spectrogram which can be identified with known biochemical compounds.  The trick is to match these components to the aromas detected by the tasting panel...

Bacteria form complex communities, hunt prey in groups and secrete chemical trails for the directed movement of thousands of individuals.  Trails of slime serve as highways for the movement of thousands...

Bacteria Also break the rules, act selfish - and thrive.

Talking Bacteria - "This idea has taken hold that these bacteria want to communicate with each other.  It may be just too good to be true..."

Tuberculosis Bacteria Join UN - "Let's face it," says a TB spokesclone, "we never really wanted to kill humans anyway.  Our ancestors inhabited humans peacefully most of the time, for hundreds of generations.  Occasionally we messed up and trashed our environment - but how many human nations haven't?"

Centrioles are arguably the most enigmatic cell organelles.  In most animal cells, a pair of centrioles resides in the centrosome - a macromolecular complex that organises the microtubule system (part of the cell's internal skeleton).  The two centrioles, a mother and a daughter, "are positioned at right angles to each other."

Darwin's Radio could give our cells the message when it's time to move on to a new species...

Et in Articulo Mortis - The first victim of the disease stiffened, as if frozen.  His skin became covered in scaly welts that grew until they became confluent, swaddling him in a jet-black shell of adamantine hardness.  At first the shell measured the contours of the body beneath, but then contracted to become a perfect, utterly inert, X-ray-opaque sphere 35 centimetres across.  The corpse (if that is what it was) was dissected - but the contents were found to be a gelatinous matrix secreted by roving amœbocytes...

Mystery Force - An unexplained force is pulling on distant spacecraft.  It could be just a tiny unnoticed effect in the spacecraft themselves, but scientists warn it could also be the first hint that modifications need to be made to our understanding of the force of gravity.  "It is almost as if the probes are not behaving according to the known law..."

The towering dark structure in the Eagle Nebula is a column of cool molecular hydrogen and dust that acts as an incubator for infant stars...

Will humans die off due to an Asteroid strike?  Or will it be due to the sun boiling away the oceans?  Or will their demise ultimately mostly be through the insurmountable difficulties surrounding procreation in the weightlessness of space?...

Earth No Passive Victim - The earth's outer atmosphere works as a heat shield to deflect and absorb some of the damaging energy of solar storms, but in the process creates a billion-degree cloud of electrified gas that sets up loops of multimillion amp electric current...

Redshifts and Pentaquarks - As an exercise, cosmologist Edward Harrison (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) tried to devise a radically different universe that passes all the major observational tests.  He succeeded surprisingly well...

Ro Ro Ro Your Bot - Of course, because of the Population Stabilisation Act of 2025, all my children are virtual simulations based on my DNA combined with that of various famous people I've fallen in love with over the years...

Chairs are the "very intimate" point at which the body and environment intersect.  We touch them with our full bodies.  Office chairs are often torture...

Keeping Your Boat Dry - One of the biggest problems we've encountered owning Lady Fair is, because of our size, there is nowhere in all of Wellington Harbour for us to get hauled out of the water.  We have to go to Picton or to Christchurch or even up to Auckland for that...

Can I Get a Witness - People see what they expect to see.  Scientists call this tendency the "base-rate error."  Consider the following...

Creation Could Be Left-Handed - In 1848 Louis Pasteur discovered that some molecules can exist in two mirror-image forms, termed right or left-handed.  Curiously, in living things the molecules tend to be one of these types and not a mixture of both...  Why life is like this is a mystery but now astronomers may have discovered why life on planet Earth is left-handed...

Don't Wilt Have a Pill - Aspirin eases aches and pains suffered by plants in much the same way it helps people and animals.  This sheds light on the "pain" mechanism that plants have, which is similar to that of animals...

Fractal Evolution - Immune cells are not simply the cops of the body.  They are "the cells of evolution" and have the ability to embrace new things - the unknown - and to learn.  They are the experts, the Sherlock Holmeses.  Further...

Potpourri - Everything that didn't fir better somewhere else including 13 things that don't make sense, the germ theory of mental illness, the legacy of those who survived the Black Death, and inventions the world still needs...

"Feed a Cold, Starve a Fever" May Be Right - eating a meal boosts the type of immune response that destroys the viruses responsible for colds, while fasting stimulates the response that tackles the bacterial infections responsible for most fevers...

Is This the Essence of Life? - Scientists from the Maryland-based Minimal Genome Project reported that they've pinpointed 300 genes that provide the minimum coded instructions to build an organism.  What about the junk?

Seeing the Earth for Its Faults - Wall Street and Midtown raised modern mountains of glass and granite because there was solid bedrock to build on; in between lay insufficient foundation for skyscrapers - hence low-slung Greenwich Village and Soho.  Before garbage and landfill were strewn in its wetlands, Manhattan was cut in two when high tides swelled the rivers - they met each other in the middle of the island, at 125th St, where a fault slices the city...

Small World - When we discover that we have friends or acquaintances in common with strangers, we often say, "It's a small world."  According to a study, such networks may exist throughout nature, not just among humans...

Strange NZ Facts - French Pass, which separates d'Urville Island from the South Island coast, is the only place in the world where two different levels of ocean can be seen at once.  This causes tremendously dangerous currents - sometimes the tide flows at up to 8 knots through the narrow Pass.  The only time we went through there, we didn't know that.  Jeff said that was the closest he's ever come to putting our boat, Lady Fair, on the rocks...

Tall Story - The Guinness Book of World Records lists Robert Pershing Wadlow, at 8'11.1", as the tallest recorded man for which there is "irrefutable evidence" as to his height...

Infinitely Big 'Branes - An extra dimension of infinite extent may supplement the three spatial dimensions we observe, and could hold the key to attempts to unify particle physics with gravity.

Spare Parts Department - Doctors in London said a 2-year-old boy there with thalassaemia, a rare genetic blood disorder which affects hæmoglobin, would die unless his parents created a test-tube sibling who might save him via a bone-marrow transplant or transfusion.

Virtual Offspring - "...Maybe she should only look at them in baby form when they were cute - she didn't like any of the adults..."

Til Death Do Us Part - Some people's blood contains cells from a sibling.  Other people are actually two individuals rolled into one.  Yet more people carry a distinct genetic mutation in only one or more parts of their bodies.  Doctors should begin paying more attention...

Morality and the Brain - In contrast to patients injured as adults, children couldn't piece together answers to moral dilemmas during tests.  They had never learnt the basic moral rules that govern social interaction, apparently because their early traumas prevented them from ever acquiring this knowledge...

I'm Not Guilty But My Brain Is - The idea that someone should not be punished if their abnormal neural make-up leaves them no choice but to break the law is not new.  However, one prominent neuroscientist has sparked a storm by arguing that crime itself should be taken as evidence of brain abnormality, even if no abnormality can be found, and criminals treated as incapable of having acted otherwise...

It Seemed So Real - Their stories are the stuff of creepy movies and daytime tv: hospital patients resuscitated on the operating table speak of being drawn toward a brilliant light or looking down on their own bodies, doctors working feverishly to save them.  What induces these haunting images?  A new study suggests they may be caused by a portion of the brain misfiring under stress...

Autism - The most characteristic feature of autism is the child's lack of a theory of other people's minds.  The classic test for this involves putting a sweet in a red box in front of John and Mary and then sending Mary out of the room.  The sweet is moved to the blue box and John is asked where Mary will look for it when she returns.  If John is autistic he will say Mary will look in the blue box as he cannot understand what Mary would really think...

Is the Brain Really Necessary? - Although the boy had an IQ of 126 and a 1st class honours degree in mathematics, he had "virtually no brain."  A CAT scan showed the boy's skull was lined with a thin layer of brain cells to a millimeter in thickness.  The rest of his skull was filled with cerebrospinal fluid.  The young man continues a normal life with the exception of his knowledge that he has essentially no brain...

Five Breakthroughs That Changed Humanity - If one could travel back to AD1000 and ask people to predict the technologies that would change the world, they might have guessed a few of them: better crops, a machine to replace horses, a means to fly.  But they'd almost certainly not understand how science and technology transformed the past millennium.  Even with hindsight, picking the top discoveries is daunting - the clock and the computer, the car and the mouldboard plough, evolution and DNA.  How does one choose?

Cell's Recycling May Yield Clues to Ageing - Scientists have identified a whirling "dervish-like" structure within cells that helps to recycle existing compounds into ATP, the molecule that stores the energy needed for life.  They believe the discovery could point to new methods of slowing the ageing process...

In the Laboratory - It is possible to vanish into a pile of completely dry sand.  The sand looks the same as the normal, weight-supporting variety... the findings could explain reports of travellers' being swallowed up in the desert... Contains 3 video clips (Flash plugin required) 2.5 meg, 3 meg, 3.5 meg

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