The 1894 kinetoscope of Fred Ott sneezing after inhaling a pinch of snuff, taken by Thomas Edison’s laboratory, was one of the first human acts ever committed to film. If you believe the internet rumors concerning the relationship between sneezing and sex, it might also have been the first movie orgasm.
No wonder nasal snuff was so popular for hundreds of years – and small wonder, too, that Pope Urban VIII threatened to excommunicate Catholics who took snuff in church….
Most people who are termed functionally or legally blind can see something, even if it is only changes in light intensity. The totally blind, conversely, see nothing; but does that mean their eyes cannot perceive light? The answer might surprise you.
Playing video games isn’t exactly rocket science but, thanks to a crowdsourcing computer game developed by University of Washington researchers, it can be molecular biology – and can offer hope to sufferers of tough-to-crack diseases such as Alzheimer’s, cancer and HIV.
Like John Henry versus the steam hammer or Garry Kasparov versus Deep Blue, Foldit players show that humans still have a thing or two to teach machines; unlike Henry, who died, or Kasparov, who lost in a rematch, protein-folding gamers still have an edge over the brute-force number crunching of supercomputers.
We tend to think of nanotechnology as the stuff of the future, but it’s already here, in hundreds of consumer products and industrial applications. As progress in this minuscule world has accelerated, concern for the environment and for public health has led to a call for green nanotechnology—approaches that accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. In this article, we’ll take a tour of how these many approaches are playing out.
Popular television crime dramas, with their super-sleuth forensics teams and equipment so cutting-edge it borders on science fiction, have left us with an odd picture of what forensic pathologists do. In the name of plot convenience and ratings, show runners have given us worlds in which good-looking medical examiners obtain results almost instantly, deriving volumes of detailed information from minuscule, improbably preserved clues.
The phenomenon has become so pronounced that some decry a trend of unrealistic evidentiary expectations among jurors, dubbing it the “CSI Effect.” It’s time to set the record straight and find out…