Scientific Gossip (38-1a)
Contains 100% gossip from concentrate
Brainy Optimism
One of the greatest unsolved mysteries is the way in which thinking and memory are organized in the brain. A survey of 2000 biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians and psychologists indicates that 97% of them believe that they personally will be the one who solves the mystery.
Coffee Cup Mathematics
The surfaces of liquids can behave in unexpectedly complicated ways, especially in the absence of gravity. Several years ago, researchers from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Stanford University and NASA’s Lewis Research Center sent a coffee substitute into orbit in the space shuttle. Contained in a specially designed vessel, the liquid appeared to confirm many aspects of the mathematical models that had been proposed to explain surface behavior. Experiments now being considered may use real coffee, both regular and decaffeinated, in various combinations with milk, cream, and non-dairy milk substitutes.
Pre-Med Shortcut Kit
“Pre-meds” -- students who wish to attend medical school — traditionally loathe and fear one college course above all others: organic chemistry. Now three Tokyo business school students are taking advantage of the students’ fear by marketing a “quick and dirty” lab kit for premedical students who wish to shortcut the path to a good grade. The pre-med kits misleadingly claim to remove the time and uncertainty from students’ organic chemistry experiments.
The kit draws on a chance discovery made by Texas A&M organic chemist A. Ian Scott. Scott found a simple way to carry out some multi-step synthetic processes which require the presence of a different specific enzyme for each step. Rather than painstakingly stage each step in order, Scott has demonstrated that certain processes will complete themselves if the entire set of enzymes are added at the beginning of the process. Entrepreneurs have seized on this idea and are now selling so-called “Organic Chemistry in One Step” kits.
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