Mercury is a world of extremes. Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator–hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C.
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If you’ve ever spent time watching chimps at the zoo, you’ve probably wondered: what are they thinking? Well, the answer might be simple: could be they’re fixin’ to hurl a rock at your head.
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Various types of microbes congregate everywhere in and on the human body. Their presence maintains their host’s health in part by making it hard for disease-causing germs to gain access to the body.
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I originally published this post on August 6, 2008 .
Since this article came out in The American Scientist in early 1999 (you can read the entire thing here (pdf) ) I have read it many times, I used it in teaching, I discussed it in Journal Clubs, and it is a never-ending fascination for me.
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Memoirs of an Addicted Brain: A Neuroscientist Examines His Former Life on Drugs [More]
Scientific American
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The vast majority of the radioactive plutonium on the planet is man-made roughly 500 metric tons, or enough to make 100,000 nuclear weapons by the calculations of the International Panel on Fissile Materials . Much of it is the legacy of the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and Russia in the latter decades of the 20th century but, more and more, it is also the legacy of nuclear power .
Now a team of scientists physicists Frank von Hippel and Richard Garwin along with environmental scientists Rodney Ewing and Allison Macfarlane suggest that burying plutonium is the only reasonable solution to this problematic stockpile in a comment to be published in Nature on May 10. ( Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) They also recommend the U.K., which is presently debating what to do with its nearly 100 metric tons of plutonium, should lead the way by studying how to immobilize the “ element from hell ” in ceramic pucks that can then be buried in deep caverns or even deeper boreholes.
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Jack Nicholson, playing the crazed caretaker in The Shining, makes me reach for a blanket. Now a study finds that people we find, well, creepy can actually make us feel colder. The research will be published in the journal Psychological Science . [ N. Pontus Leander , Tanya L. Chartrand and John A. Bargh, You Give Me the Chills: Embodied Reactions to Inappropriate Amounts of Behavioral Mimicry]
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I have this slim silver book on my desk called the “Quick Reference to the Diagnostic Criteria From DSM-IV-TR .” Page 153 reads:
Schizophrenia
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The first hours of life can be rough. So for years newborns in the hospital were given pacifiers to calm and quiet them–with many breastfeeding advocates worrying the newborns would get used to the artificial nipple and be less inclined to take to the breast.
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