Varia
revere | February 16, 2007The smell of coins. I can't resist blogging this. It's science.
The signature metallic smell of a handful of coins isn't the scent of pure metal. According to Virginia Tech organic chemist Dietmar Glindemann, most people wouldn't even recognize the acrid smell of a vat of copper. But in a recent experiment, Glindemann showed that when we handle metal objects like coins (most U.S. coins are about 75 percent copper), our sweat begins corroding them immediately, creating a film of unstable ions that behave like partially oxidized rust. Fatty acids from oils on the skin are decomposed by these…
revere | November 21, 2006It's hard to believe but apparently people are still falling for the Nigerian email scam. Reuters has a story saying it is costing millions to UK residents and I'm guessing the same is true in the US. Since you are no doubt reading this on a computer and are therefore hooked up to the internet and probably have an email account somewhere, chances are you have been offered the chance to get risk via an URGENT MESSAGE.
The recipient is told they will earn a commission in exchange for aiding the sender in transferring funds.
The catch is that the victim has to send their bank details or even…
revere | October 28, 2006I'm guessing few of you have heard of the physician, Robert Mayer. After all, he lived more than 150 years ago. Yet he is a discoverer of one of Nature's great laws, the First Law of Thermodynamics (otherwise known as Conservation of Energy). A strange topic for this site? My attention was drawn to it upon reading of the circumstances which prompted his discovery.
In February of 1840, newly graduated he sailed as the doctor aboard the Dutch merchant ship Java enroute to Indonesia. During his enforced leisure aboard ship he studied physiology. Three months after setting off from Rotterdam he…
revere | September 11, 2006Most of us think of Percy Bysshe Shelley as a romantic poet concerned with love and beauty. He was, of course. But he was also a fierce fighter for liberty and foe of unbridled political power.
His target in this sonnet was King George:
England In 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn--mud from a muddy spring,
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,
An army,…
revere | September 5, 2006With the news of the tragic death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin, stabbed through the heart by a stingray while filming a nature program, I was reminded of similar story. Well, maybe not so similar, because the victim was not a committed conservationist like Irwin, but a deep sea fisherman. Which makes a difference, at least to me, so I'm not sure exactly how to react to his. I'm not making fun of this. The human victim could easily have died. Still . . .
Ian Card, 32, was in stable condition at King Edward VII Hospital in the British Island territory from a wound that his doctor said…
revere | September 4, 2006A weird study of men's preference for filled out or thin women is said to show that hungry men prefer heavier women than satiated men.
[Researchers] recruited male university students as they entered or exited a campus dining hall during dinner time.
They asked the men to rate how hungry they were on a scale of one to seven. Using these responses, the researchers selected 30 hungry and 31 satiated men to take part in the study.
The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of 50 women of varying weights, all within a healthy range, who had been photographed wearing tight grey leotards…
revere | September 3, 2006When someone found a dead rooster on his Manhattan apartment fire escape, the worried resident sensibly thought something was amiss and called police. If this were Thailand or Indonesia we might be thinking bird flu. But there was a vital clue pointing to a non-viral etiology: the rooster was missing its head.
This was a case for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The trail soon led to a neighbor:
Humberto Rodriguez, 52, told agents that he bit the rooster's head off because he blamed it for injuring a pet pigeon that he also kept in the apartment, [ASPCA…