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…
We hear a lot about pheromones these days. Scent sellers have been touting their powers of sexual attraction and libido amplification for years, but the science behind these claims is sketchy at best. Although pheromone production and detection by humans remains controversial, pheromones are used throughout the insect and vertebrate worlds, among crustaceans and even in plants, in exciting and often surprising ways.
According to the Simpsons, the Merciless Pepper of Quetzalacatenango is grown by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum deep in the jungle primeval. Homer resorted to coating his mouth with candle wax to beat the heat of this so-called Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. In this article, I’ll try to give you some better options while I answer the piquant question…
How can we live on a planet overflowing with 326 million trillion gallons of water and still face shortages? Even if only about .05 percent of it is drinkable, shouldn’t there be some way to purify the rest? Actually, people all over the world convert seawater to potable water, but the process tends to be prohibitively expensive at large scales. Even so, with looming droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for a solution grows more essential every day.
Induction cooktops are faster than electrics, as responsive as gas, and safer and easier to clean than glass-and-ceramic-top stoves. Unlike these other approaches, which heat food indirectly, induction cooktops use electromagnetism to heat the cookware itself. In this article, I’ll show you how the same power-producing principle that drives Hoover Dam’s giant generators is being used to cook dinner in a kitchen near you.
How induction cooktops work