The Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be happening tomorrow (Thursday, Dec. 10).  This year the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz Sancar "for mechanistic studies of DNA repair".  Now I haven't read any of their published work, and I'm not a super scientist or anything close to that, but I...

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I wanted to make a crab cake casserole for Thanksgiving this year, but because of the current toxic algae situation along the California coast, it doesn't look like the crab cakes will happen. Bummer.  The toxic algal bloom (brought on by warm El Nino waters) has caused the commercial crab season to be postponed until further notice (that super sucks for the fishermen)....

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The body reacts and acclimates to the cold in a number of ways. Our bodies shiver and our teeth chatter. Goosebumps form. All this is done by the little almond in our brains (the hypothalamus- responsible for thermoregulation) to make sure that we keep warm when the weather outside is frightful. Now as the temperature outside gets cooler, the old people in your...

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A lot of people have heard of Schrodinger's cat, but not many know the purpose behind the thought experiment. Schrodinger came up with a thought experiment A cat is placed in a box with a Geiger counter, a hammer, a radioactive substance, and a vial of poison. Once the radioactive material decays, the Geiger will detect and trigger the hammer to smash the...

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When I was in college, I worked at an ice core vacuum lab interested in the history of trace gases obtained from ice cores (they also researched about oceanic trace gases responsible for atmospheric processes affecting climate change, but during my stay at the ice lab, I only handled ice cores). These trace gases were extracted and then quantified using gas chromatography mass...

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As a kid I would sit in the backseat and look up out the window and wonder why the sky was blue. But as an incredibly lazy kid, I never bothered to find out the answer until college. And it wasn't even me looking the answer up. We were given the explanation in p-chem lecture. The skinny The air molecules in the Earth's...

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