VIEW HEADLINES ONLY
Amazing Facts

World’s Smallest Rotary Engine Highlighted
May 25, 2009
The smallest rotary motor in the world keeps your body humming.  It also keeps bacteria, plants, polar bears, giraffes, salmon, sea urchins and just about everything else humming.  It’s a nano-wonder called ATP synthase.  This molecular motor has been reported many times in these pages, but not recently; what’s new?  The state of our knowledge […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Cool Bird Tricks
May 19, 2009
Evidence continues to mount that a lot of capability is packed into a little bird’s brain.  We should use the phrase bird-brain to honor smart animals. I C U:  Mockingbirds can recognize individual humans.  Disturb a mockingbird nest, and the parents will single you out from a crowd and go into attack mode, researchers at […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Cuttlefish Inspire Reflective Screens
May 14, 2009
“Cuttlefish are masters of disguise, able to change their skin color in less than a second to hide from predators or draw in prey for the kill,” begins an article on MSNBC News.  A team at MIT, fascinated with the physics of this capability, tried to imitate it.  They found they could electrically control the […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Better Solar Cells with Diatoms
April 14, 2009
Let’s start with the operative quote before the subject matter: “Nature is the engineer, not high tech tools.  This is providing a more efficient, less costly way to produce some of the most advanced materials in the world.”  OK, now the subject: how to build better solar cells, by imitating diatoms.  See the story on […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Your Eye Works a Precision Jigsaw Puzzle
April 7, 2009
You have twin 125 megapixel video cameras in your eyeballs.  Each pixel, a rod or cone connected to a neuron, sees only a small bit of the total image.  How do these bits, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, fit together?  Scientists at the Salk Institute have found that they are finely tuned to fit […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Quick, Make Like an Ant
April 5, 2009
Ants deserve a lot of respect, despite being a nuisance in the kitchen.  The very fact they are so effective at bugging us is a testament to their ingenuity in foraging, communicating and organizing themselves into successful colonies.  We might just gain some valuable knowledge by watching them more closely. Foraging: Live Science says that […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Envying the Tooth of the Sea Urchin
March 31, 2009
Did you know the lowly sea urchin has a tooth?  It’s not just any tooth: it’s “a remarkable grinding tool,” according to a team of international scientists.  They even used the word “exquisite” in the title of their paper in PNAS.1  Humans might benefit from knowing more about this tool.  “The improved understanding of these […]
CONTINUE READING
Early Man

Gobekli Tepe: What Mean These Ancient Stones?
March 10, 2009
Imagine stone carvings and monuments whose age make the pyramids and Stonehenge look like artifacts of modern history. Such monuments exist on a hill in Turkey at a site called Gobekli Tepe. Squared-off limestone blocks stacked like the letter T, arranged in circles, with ornate animal carvings on them, have been baffling archaeologists for the […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Cell Motors Play Together
February 27, 2009
If one molecular machine by itself is a wonder, what would you think of groups of them playing in concert?  Recent papers and news articles are claiming that’s what happens in living cells: molecular motors coordinate their efforts.     Science Daily led off a story on this by saying, “Even within cells, the left […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Assassins Roam Our Highways
February 22, 2009
Slinking surreptitiously through our blood streams, the assassins prowl about, looking for their targets.  These are not terrorists or vigilantes.  They have a license to kill.  Be glad they are there; they have saved your life many times.  They are called natural killer cells.     PhysOrg reported on work going on at Howard Hughes […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Songbirds Sing on a Fast Wing
February 17, 2009
Purple martins and wood thrushes are common songbirds of the eastern United States.  Until recently, it has not been possible to follow their movements accurately.  Now, a team of biologists in Toronto, Erie and Cambridge was able to track them with tiny geolocators.  They found that the little birds fly farther and faster than previously […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

The Uses of Wood Rot
February 16, 2009
Wood rot fungus doesn’t sound like a useful thing.  Most people would rather get rid of it – especially those who have seen their houses decay because of it.  Some scientists, however, are intrigued by it.  It may have properties that could some day help power your car.     Science Daily reported that the […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Modeling Solar Cells on Butterflies
February 7, 2009
Sunlight is free – if we could just learn how to use it better.  For decades, engineers have been trying to improve the efficiency of solar cells.  Why not look at nature?  Science Daily reported on work going on in China and Japan: “The discovery that butterfly wings have scales that act as tiny solar […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Evolution as Efficiency Expert
February 6, 2009
Who would have thought that a lowly bacterium is a “master of industrial efficiency”?  That’s what a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science called it.  E. coli, the best-studied microbe, “can be thought of as a factory with just one product: itself,” a press release said.  “It exists to make copies of itself, and […]
CONTINUE READING
Amazing Facts

Corn Is Fuel in More Ways than One
February 3, 2009
There’s been controversy lately about the diversion of corn crops from food for humans to ethanol for engines.  Why not both?  A new pilot program announced by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft saves the corn cobs for eating but makes ethanol out of the straw.  If so, this would make the whole plant an energy factory for the human […]
CONTINUE READING
All Posts by Date
[archives type="yearly" cat_id="24"]