May 2011

The Bees are Making a Comeback!

Like many other Americans, I worry about the decline of the bees. Einstein said we wouldn’t survive without them, and I believe that. Every time I see the hummingbird feeder on our front porch swimming with little dead bees who were suckered into drinking the nectar, I feel like a murderer—like me wanting to attract hummingbirds has a direct effect on the universe!

Maybe it does. A butterfly’s wings, and all of that.

But there is also some good news regarding honeybees—at least, in some areas. In California, the bee populations are considered the highest they’ve been in about seven years right now, which not only helps us humans, but also boosts the economy in California.

Fukushima: Design Flaws in the Cooling Vents

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The United States needs to take heed of the lessons learned at Fukushima in order to avoid another disaster of similar proportions happening on our own soil. According to the NYT, the failures at Fukushima were not only related to the delayed use of the cooling vents in the nuclear reactor, but to possible design flaws within the cooling vents themselves.

 

Robot Boat to Sail the Seas of Titan

New project seeks support to research potential life on Saturn's moon

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As a writer, I can’t get enough of science stories that both fascinate intellectually and stir the creative imagination. When I learned there were diamond oceans with solid diamond icebergs on Neptune and Uranus, my brain went crazy at trying to imagine them. It seems the universe is filled to the brim with scenes whose beauty we can only imagine. The scientific study of planets other than our own not only helps us understand the physical universe, it brings new and strange ideas to the collective human imagination.

Alexis Carrel has been called a Nazi-sympathizer, the father of tissue culture

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Alexis Carrel has been called many things: a Nazi-sympathizer, a quack, the greatest scientist alive.  The French scientist was a Nobel Prize winner in Physiology or Medicine, but also likely falsified much of his sensationalized “chicken heart” research for many years.  Whether he was a brilliant man or a crackpot, in one way or another Carrel set the exclamatory tone used by the press and the general public regarding tissue culture experiments, and other science experiments, for decades to come. 

Racist tests towards blacks in mid-20th century America

 

 

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I am currently reading Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a book about the life of a black woman whose cancerous tissue created the first infinitely reproducing cells used for scientific research.  A lot of the book centers around the ethical issues in the case—neither Henrietta nor her family ever gave the doctors permission to harvest her cells in the first place, and despite going for $25 dollars a vial in the 1940’s, the Lacks family has never seen a dime for their mothers’ cells.