Jesse Owens starting the 200 meter race at the 1936 Olympics. Reproduction of photograph in “Die Olympischen Spiele, 1936” p.27, 1936.
Coverage of the recent victory of the New Zealand team in the America’s Cup yacht race featured sailboats flying along on their underwater foils at ridiculous speed, speeds reaching more than 50 miles (80 km) per hour. Whether it’s running, or driving a car, or sailing these mutant boats, speed is exciting.… Read the rest “Speed Limits”
There’s a great book about vitamin A, “Brilliance & Confusion: Saving Children’s Vision & Lives With Vitamin A”. Okay, I confess. It’s my own book a couple of years ago. Vitamin A was discovered in 1913, but it has continued to provide surprises since. The most important of these is that it isn’t essential just for vision, which is what most people know about it. Rather, it is needed to maintain many functions necessary for health, and life itself.… Read the rest “A Great New Book”
It’s a good idea to look critically at any powerful new technology, and the creation of genetically-modified organisms, GMOs, is no exception. Like any new technology, it might have unanticipated, deleterious consequences that outweigh any benefit. Many criticisms of GMO have of course been raised, as a brief interrogation of the internet will show. But unfortunately, the criticisms of GMOs we hear most often are not the most important ones, and the ones that are most important are often not heard clearly.… Read the rest “GMO”
(Bald Eagle and Hawk Mountain scenery. Image courtesy of David Dehner.)
Hawk Mountain, a picturesque site in southeastern Pennsylvania, is on the eastern slopes of the Appalachians. These mountains create an updraft that helps raptors, large birds of prey such as hawks and eagles, on their migratory flights between their northern summer habitats and their wintering sites in the southeast United States. They are also somewhat of a bottleneck, causing large numbers of raptors to converge in their flight paths and pass over Hawk Mountain.… Read the rest “Malaria: No Simple Solutions”
Our bones, teeth and hair carry in them an encrypted GPS log of where we’ve been. If you lived in Seattle through your childhood and moved to Chicago ten years ago, that is indelibly written there. There will also be a record of what you’ve eaten recently. Advances in the science and technology of reading that information are having an impact on forensics, anthropology and agriculture, among other pursuits. At the heart of that technology lies a fundamental property of matter, which is that many of the atoms that make up all of creation come in subtle variations, variations that we are able to detect with great precision.… Read the rest “Your travels are Written in your body”
(C57 Black/6 mouse) Attacking cancer with the immune system is one of the most enticing dreams of cancer researchers and oncologists. This dream has floated in and out of the foreground for over a century; as early as the 1890s, such a mechanism was probably responsible for a number of “miracle” cancer cures, even if the immune system was still much of a mystery. Since then, the dream of cancer immunotherapy has offered up promising results, but has never fully revealed itself.… Read the rest “Mice and Men”
What do you think of when you hear the term “circadian rhythm”? For most of us, it’s “jet lag”, because that’s the way we’ve likely encountered it. But “circadian”, which refers to anything biological that goes through a cycle in about 24 hours, applies to many aspects of the lives of plants, animals, and even bacteria.
Daily variations in the behaviors of plants and animals have been known about since antiquity.… Read the rest “Circadian Rhythm I – the plant world”
Some people have a hard time keeping to the conventional clock. They strongly prefer to sleep and stay up late. Some people show the opposite behaviour; they wake up very early, but are ready for bed well before the late evening news. Although there may be exceptions (teenagers and jazz musicians come to mind), both kinds of behaviour are often related to a changed circadian rhythm. Late sleepers are referred to as “delayed phase” in their circadian rhythm, while those who are exceptionally early to bed – early to rise are said to have “Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome” (FASPS).… Read the rest “Circadian Rhythm II – Us”
If, like most of us, you carry more weight than you wish you did, you may have wondered, from time to time, how much that extra poundage affects your health. This has been intensively studied over the past decades. Generally, studies compare health outcomes at different values of Body Mass Index (BMI), which is a useful way to describe body type. BMI is the ratio of weight to the square of height, in metric units.… Read the rest “You can eat fat, but don’t get fat”
Tens of thousands of grocery store items play up the fact that they are “reduced-fat”, reflecting both the government’s advice about eating less fat, and our concerns about becoming overweight or obese. Our food-shopping habits have changed over the past fifty years, as warnings were posted by the American Heart Association, Department of Agriculture Food Guides, and other agencies that became alarmed at the risk posed by fats, particularly of the ‘saturated” type, for heart disease and other medical problems.… Read the rest “The big fat myth”
