When you have been around as long as Harvard, and your library contains 15 million books, you are bound to have a few that are bound in human flesh.Wait, what?Yes, an interesting article by Samuel Jacobs in The Crimson from 2006 got resurrected recently. It detailed what librarians would rather not become an object of morbid fascination - that some of their books are bound in human skin. Odd,...
read moreNothing says fun to a kid like talking about carbon dioxide and nucleation sites and surfactants.Actually, that sounds really, really boring. But if you instead tell them you are going to cause a giant geyser of soda to erupt in the driveway, they will get pretty excited. Then they will ask what happens if you use different sodas, and then different candies, and suddenly a little experimental...
read moreEnjoy Greek yogurt?Maybe, if you hate nature. Because it is now a $2 billion a year industry, activists have turned on it, a fate that the $29 billion organic food industry has so far escaped. One Green Planet says the greek yogurt manufacturing process is "creating an ecological nightmare beyond all comprehension" which tells you that no one at One Green Planet can do simple math. And they...
read moreLike with a perfectly safe genetically modified salmon, Keystone XL, Yucca Mountain and most other inconvenient science, if the government doesn't want to go on record overturning scientists, it just ignores them.It's a safe move. Scientists rely on politicians for funding, so they are not going to become a voting bloc. Sometimes they aren't ignored, they are just never...
read moreOrganic food has built a lot of mythology around its process - more ethical, more nutritional, fewer pesticides, a larger penis for the sons of organic shoppers - but one claim was a puzzler only subscribed to by the kind of people who buy homeopathy and healing crystals; that eating organic might reduce the risk of cancer. read...
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