Water: A Space Odyssey
May 16, 2013
Eva Gusnowski
Water is a pretty amazing substance, but its even more amazing in space:
He's bringin' sexy 'stache and making science fun and accessible for everyone. I wonder how many more kids want to be astronauts now because of Chris Hadfield...
Yummy Mommy
May 12, 2013
Torah Kachur
Mom’s sacrifice a lot for their kids like sleepless nights and hours spent at the rink. And today we celebrate their sacrifices by buying them flowers, chocolate and cheesy cards.
For black lace weaver spider mothers they sacrifice a bit more than sleep, they pay with their lives. The spider is common to European woodlands practices something called matriphagy where the hundreds of young she produces feed off their mom right after they hatch. For the black lace weaver spider their idea of celebrating mom is to consume her completely.
She even encourages this by drumming her feet and jumping around signalling to her young that it’s time to feed and get a head start in life. Thankfully, we can stick with flowers and leave cannibalism to the spiders. The benefits are obvious: no one to nag you as a teenager and also a nice nutritious meal just when you have to go off into the wilderness.
Take a look at little baby spiders chowing on mom here
For this Mother's Day, I will celebrate my dearest mommy by not eating her.....
Feed Me, Seymour!
May 9, 2013
Eva Gusnowski
I have killed so many plants, that I've often wondered if they would ever be able to just tell me when they needed water. Well, now they can thanks to a company called Botanicalls.
It all started with at phone call:
And now your plants can even tweet you:
As long as it doesn't come to this...
...then we'll all be okay.
Mother Ship
April 26, 2013
Torah Kachur
I now work for CBC radio, it's a pretty cool gig as the science columnist where I get to talk about all sorts of different topics like biggest space science aboard the ISS to the smallest chemistry of pennies.
And I spent yesterday at the Mother Ship of CBC in Toronto. It was from there I did my newest column on the science of making decisions.
I spend 6 minutes a week talking about science in the various markets, six minutes. CBC is our best science media outlet in the country that appeals to a general audience, they have the wildly successful Quirks and Quarks and the technology show Spark. Those air for an hour a week, and my six minutes.
That means that, on average, a completely and utterly loyal listener to CBC will get 2 hours and 6 minutes of science programming in their lives a week. When, let's face it, people have busy lives and don't listen to talk radio 24/7.
We must do better, science should permeate people's lives because it controls it. The more we know, the more we understand that science dictates all of our existence. There is a desperate need for more people to be doing what I'm doing right now....sitting in the airport and dreaming of a world where people love science. Where people are curious about the world around them and will delve into the intricacies of the world in us.
This is a call to action for all of us - celebrate scientists, write, share, blog, pitch, read, listen, watch. Science is everything, if you ignore it, there is nothing.
Portion Distortion
April 25, 2013
Eva Gusnowski
The “Obesity Epidemic” isn’t just a pseudo-band made up by the minds behind Jimmy Kimmel bits. It’s real and it is threatening the health of a large portion of the population. And restaurants are certainly not helping.
The portion of food provided by restaurants, theaters, fast food places, and you name it, is much higher than what is appropriate for even a mammoth. And the proportions have been increasing steadily for many MANY years.
We would all like to believe that we are strong-minded individuals. But can simple willpower prevent us from overeating?
Recent research has attempted to see if mindfulness and education would allow control over the amount of food that was eaten. Participants were placed in the education (taught about how external factors can affect food intake), mindfulness (taught how to increase the sensory awareness of food) or control (taught nothing) group. These individuals were then randomized and initially served either an oversized portion or an appropriate portion of food, with further access to as much food as they wanted after the initial portion was finished.
Regardless of the group the participants initially belonged to, on average the people fed the larger portion ate 34% more than those fed the smaller portion. In comparison to the recommended amount of calories for a meal, people given the small portion ate within the recommended allowance, while those given the larger portion exceeded it. This means that regardless of what we know or what we are taught, if there is more food available to us then we will eat more than we need or than we should. So really, the best thing we can do to prevent overeating is to petition restaurants to decrease portion sizes.
Size really does matter, in ways that we never knew before.
Earth
April 22, 2013
Torah Kachur
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
~Carl Sagan
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
Bacterial Time Share
April 18, 2013
Eva Gusnowski
Your body is a wonderland…for microbes. And your pet dog is the dirty rag that spreads them around.
It’s no surprise that we are covered in bacteria. Thankfully they’re so small that they are invisible to the naked eye, otherwise we would all have some serious germaphobic issues at hand. What is interesting, however, is that we all have our own “fingerprint” of bacteria that inhabit our skin.
In fact, the bacteria cells in and on a human body outnumber human cells 10:1, and the bacteria make up anywhere from 1-3% of our body weight. To put that in perspective, a normal and healthy 200 lb human contains anywhere from 2-6 pounds of bacteria. Get that image in your head, and then never forget it. Because everywhere you go, you’re shedding and spreading your “skin microbiome.” After all, mother did always tell us that we should share, right?
A group of researchers decided to look at how much we share our skin bacterial flora with our brethren; specifically they looked at how much skin bacteria was shared within a single household between co-inhabitants, both with and without man’s best friend (no, not the Xbox or the PS3, we’re referring to the furry best friend here).
They found that co-inhabitants within a single household were more likely to share a bacterial community, likely through contact with shared surfaces (including one another). Not only that, but households with a dog shared bacterial types with their furry beast and also shared more bacteria with one another when compared to households without a dog.
Oh science. Thanks for making life grosser than it ever needed to be. But it’s always nice to share.
Sexy 'Stache
April 15, 2013
Torah Kachur
Commander Hadfield has made science cool again, he's charming, witty, intelligent and most of all.....he's got that 'stache....
