Everything goes in and out of Venice on flat barges — no walls, edges, or rails to steady the contents, even when it’s expensive scientific equipment. So I sat with my hands on as many boxes as I could as we sped through the narrow canals of “The Floating City,” …
Read moreAs a graduate student getting my PhD in chemistry, I’m expected to keep a laboratory notebook. It’s where I document what I do each day: the aim of the experiment, the conditions I use and the outcome. My lab notebook serves as a memory aid, allowing me to …
Read moreAs I stand in an emerald green room beneath a windmill in Zaanse Schans, Netherlands, wearing a canvas smock and disposable gloves, I am front-row to a demonstration of how artists traditionally made oil paints. The craftsman dumps a mound of ultramarine blue …
Read moreIt’s a Friday morning in the painting conservation offices at the Art Institute of Chicago. I’m ushered through security and brought to a staging room. It’s cavernous. I tilt my head up: Towering black matte walls meet a black ceiling somewhere out of sight, and I can …
Read moreAs a young girl I could spend hours playing with my parents’ refrigerator magnets. I used to pretend that one magnet was a magic wand that was causing the other to move back and forth and rotate through supernatural powers. Magnetism seemed …
Read moreA new era of growth in the field of perovskite solar cells began this month, with the publication of a paper by Mercouri Kanatzidis, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science …
Read moreIt’s virtually impossible to read this blog without the aid of plastics. Our phones, our computers, our printers, all use the material made popular by a 20th century revolution in manufacturing. And yet, plastic seems to have become a bad word. Starbucks recently …
Read moreContemporary painter and photographer Chuck Close has displayed artwork at famed galleries around the world. He has published several books of his paintings and was an acting member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Some of his works have even …
Read moreWhat do cows, landfills, and petroleum extraction all have in common? Each produces methane, one of the greenhouse gases trapping heat in our atmosphere and warming the planet. This gas is potent: it has over twenty times the heat-trapping capacity of the most familiar …
Read moreTent, sleeping bags, raingear: check. Flashlight, S’mores, clean water: check. Sunscreen, toothpaste: check. Finally loaded up for the last camping trip of the summer, you hit the road confidently, knowing that you’re prepared for whatever surprises Mother Nature …
Read more