Pharyngula: Required reading

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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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Thixotropy — the property that lets toothpaste ooze when squeezed out of its tube and yet not drip off the toothbrush — may explain a centuries-old miracle. Blood, once congealed, tends to stay that way. But when religious leaders handle a vial believed to contain the blood of St. Januarius, the dark brown substance begins to flow. Periodic demonstrations of this effect have drawn crowds to Naples since 1389, notes Luigi Garlaschelli, an organic chemist at the University of Pavia in Italy. In the Oct. 10 [issue of] Nature, Garlaschelli and two other Italian researchers propose that medieval alchemists could have created a thixotropic substance that looked like blood by mixing water and salt with a mineral called molysite. Thixotropic materials exist as gels until a mechanical stress — such as picking up or tilting their containers — makes them flow. To explore this possibility, Garlaschelli searched through the scientific literature and discovered that about 70 years ago, researchers demonstrated thixotropy in an iron hydroxide alloy. He reproduced their work by mixing a ferric chloride compound with calcium carbonate in water, then separating out the iron hydroxide that formed. By adding salt to a solution of this alloy, he created a dark brown gel. 'It looks exactly like the samples in Naples,' he told Science News. All of these materials were available five centuries ago, including ferric chloride, found near Mt. Vesuvius in the form of molysite, he says.

[Ivars Peterson, Science News 140(15):229, 12 October 1991]

A Taste of Pharyngula

(Complete listing)

Ancient rules for Bilaterian development

Pycnogonid tagmosis and echoes of the Cambrian

PZ Myers' Own Original, Cosmic, and Eccentric Analogy for How the Genome Works -OR- High Geekology

Flap those gills and fly!

That revolting article about earwax and smegma

A rising starlet in evo-devo

Homo floresiensis, Flores Man

Deep homologies in the pharyngeal arches

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« I teach Intelligent Design, too | Main | That's some law, that Patriot Act »

Required reading

Category: Academics • Politics
Posted on: January 30, 2006 12:01 PM, by PZ Myers

I will join the chorus in praising Bérubé's essay on academic freedom. It's excellent; now if only the people most desperately in need of reading it weren't barely literate anti-intellectual thugs, it would be an awesomely persuasive rhetorical tool.
That Mannion fellow explains why the Republicans don't want us to fight Alito. I always thought Linus was a prissy apologist for the status quo, and that that blanket was a symbol of his inability to stretch his mind beyond his narrow Judaeo-Christian bias.

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