Science
reMIND – Creative Eccentrics: Making the Connection
Known as “Japan’s Edison,” Yoshiro NakaMats holds the world record for patents, with over 3,000 to his credit. You can thank NakaMats for the digital watch, the CD, and the DVD, just to name a few of his most popular inventions1. However, his method for invention, as well as his daily routine, may strike you [...]
Music: An Adaptation or a Side Effect?
Humans have evolved all sorts of advantageous adaptations for survival and reproduction, the two aspects of living things that drive natural selection. Music, however, does not seem to directly benefit either. So why has it evolved as such a significant and indispensable part of human culture for over (at least) the last 35,000 years2? What [...]
The American Food Industry: An Incubator for Disaster
In the United States, the food production industry pervades everything we do. Meetings with friends are often accompanied by lunch or coffee, family dinners are treasured as time to bond with family, and mealtimes are regarded as sacred. So much of what we do revolves around food that imagining what would happen if that food [...]
Another Rhino Species Poached Out of Existence
The Western Black Rhinoceros (Diceros bicornis longipes) of Africa was declared extinct by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) last November. There have been no sightings of the sub-species since 2006 despite intensive survey throughout its Cameroon homeland.1 Two other rhino species, the Northern white rhino in central Africa and the Javan [...]
Gaming: Harnessing the Cognitive Surplus
Harnessing the Cognitive Surplus By James Scott-Brown How do you spend your free time? If you were an average American, you would spend 20 hours a week watching television, and another 3 hours playing games [1]. Clay Shirky has written about how, after the Second World War, enormous changes in society occurred, so that “society [...]
What Makes a Pretty Face? The Biological Basis of Beauty
Biological Basis of Beauty By Thomas Gizbert Poet and philosophical essayist Kahlil Gibran wrote in the early 20th century, “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart” [1]. However, a number of recent studies are building a scientific case against this statement, claiming that beauty resides not in the heart, [...]
Chemzymes, Challenging Nature: How Artificial Enzymes Are Becoming Nature’s Counterparts
Enzymes were discovered as early as the nineteenth century, [15] when Eduard Buchner extracted the enzyme responsible for the fermentation of sugars from yeast into alcohol. Besides earning him the Nobel Prize, Buchner’s work began the process of elucidating the diverse functions of enzymes, thousands of which have since been identified [12]. They allow us [...]
Learning (and Loving) a Foreign Language
Throughout my high school years, among the things always stashed away in my frayed lime-colored backpack, alongside my IB Chemistry study guide and a slew of math practice tests, was a sheet of vibrantly pink construction paper. On this were written a number of short songs, rhymes, charts and acronyms, all thought up to help [...]
Dying Without Sleep: Insomnia and its Implications
Ideally, humans sleep for at least eight hours every day, meaning that we spend about a third of our lives “unconscious.” Scientists have yet to agree on why this unconsciousness is vital, but we know that without sleep, all mammals and birds would die [1]. Because sleep has only become the subject of research in [...]
The Altruism of Recycling
Why do we recycle? A 1996 New York Times commentary declared recycling to be “the most wasteful activity in modern America” [1]. Critics have suggested that recycling lowers industrial rates of production and consumes enough energy to easily outweigh its scant benefits to the environment [2]. On the other hand, there is also evidence proposing [...]
Facts for Digestion: The Negative Effects of an Animal-Heavy Diet
A jet plane streaks across a caerulean backdrop, expelling a stream of smoke as it goes. An SUV cruises along the road, leaving a quickly dissipating trail of carbon dioxide in its wake. A coal factory darkens the sky view, interrupting the blue patches with plumes of smog. These are the typical images which come [...]
NASA’s Life changing Arsenic Organism?
NASA held a press conference on December 2, 2010, about their discovery of a bacterium researchers claimed was able to use arsenic, instead of phosphorous, as part of its DNA backbone. This press conference was extremely well advertised and promised the existence of something extraterrestrial. But the organism in question, GFAJ-1, is far from extraterrestrial [...]
Connect With Us
