This story about ethylene glycol poisoning sent me to the wiki.
Australian doctors said they plugged a poisoned Italian tourist into a vodka drip after running out of the medicinal alcohol they would normally have used to save his life.
The 24-year-old Italian, who was not further identified, was diagnosed as having ingested a large quantity of […]
160 million years ago, a smallish asteroid, about 60 km in diameter impacted a larger asteroid, 170 km diameter, out in the main asteroid belt of our system. This collision formed about 300 bodies larger than 10 km diameter and about 140,000 bodies 1 km diameter and larger. One of the larger […]
DNA is being used to study evolution. Amen.
Unlike teeth and skulls and other bones, hair is no match for the pitiless ravages of weather, geologic upheaval and time. So although skulls from millions of years ago testify to the increase in brain size as one species of human ancestor evolved into the next, and although […]
Hervé This is a chemist geek. He’s a chef geek. He’s two, two, two geeks in one. Hervé This got a degree in physical chemistry in 1980 and went off to study cooking. Among his accomplishments is the reduction of 451 classic French sauces to 23 distinct types. That’s some […]
Has it come to this?
Sometimes, you can’t stop your weight-loss secrets from leaking out.
Dieters have been flocking to drugstores to pick up Alli, the first over-the-counter weight-loss pill to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration, despite the scary warning: Stray too far from your low-fat diet and you just might poop your pants.
The […]
There is a great article in the NY Times Magazine about quitting anti-depressants. Here is the nuts:
What was happening was this: When I started taking Effexor, the drug began inhibiting my brain cells’ process of reabsorbing “excess” serotonin — that is, the serotonin that had gone unused in sending signals across the synapses from […]
Folding at Home is a distributed computing project, similar to the one for SETI, that may actually work. They are doing first principles chemistry to try to learn how proteins fold.
Our goal: to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases
What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology’s workhorses — […]
Neely Tucker writes a fun article about the chemistry of love.
There are two shrimp-size things on either side of your brain called the caudate nuclei. This is the gear that operates bodily movements and the body’s reward system: “the mind’s network for general arousal, sensations of pleasure, and the motivation to acquire rewards,” Fisher writes. […]
Yes, sometimes, you need to muck out the brain. Like after a stroke. And someone has invented a brain cleaner.
An injury to the brain can be devastating. When brain cells die, whether from head trauma, stroke or disease, a substance called glutamate floods the surrounding areas, overloading the cells in its path and setting off […]
I have been thinking about the ill that is factory produced meat. This article puts PAID on it.
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of […]