Recycling plastics for a greener future By: Molly Sun Every day, I cook up something new – fresh biscuits, fettuccine, and even soft-serve ice cream. But none of my creations are edible. The fluffy biscuits are buttery-yellow polyurethane foam, deceptively warm and soft. The fettuccine noodles are long, brittle strands of polyurethane film with a […]
A senior astrophysicist at the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor at Northwestern, Kalogera digs into why she keeps coming back to astrophysics, after more than three decades in astronomy. By: Katie Liu The universe chirped on a Monday. The first indication that astronomical history had been made came in the […]
By: Christian Elliott A shorter version of this story ran in Sierra Magazine on December 4, 2022. Dennis Whigham closes the car door, straightens his blue baseball cap and squints into the woodland before him. A maze of planks crisscrosses a forest floor covered with cables and hoses. Little yellow flags wave in the breeze […]
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,” …
Graduate student Matthew Verosloff, hangs by one arm off a dirt ledge as he leans his body over the edge of a river. His free arm is reaching down with a test tube to collect a sample of water. He’s in Costa Rica escaping the frigid cold of winter in Chicago …
As 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 …
As 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 …
It’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 …
As 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 …
A 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 …
It’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 …
Contemporary 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 …
What 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 …
Tent, 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 …
When an oven bakes you can feel the heat, and on a stovetop you can see the flames emanating from the surface. A microwave oven, on the other hand, can cook food quickly, without any visible source of heat. They work because of the type of radiation …
As of now, I’m two-thirds of the way toward one of my life goals: making (and eating) an entirely homegrown Caprese. Popular in Italian-American eateries, Caprese (cuh-pray-say) salad – affectionately known as “tomato-mozz” in my family – is actually devoid of any true …
The Rio 2016 Olympiad opened with a bang Friday night. Over opening weekend, though, the gymnasts and swimmers of Team USA brought more than just game faces to the arena. Athletes, including swimming superstar Michael Phelps, have been …
I recently helped polish silver for a fancy dinner party. While I rubbed purple-gray paste over the tines of the forks, feeling a little like a maid in Downton Abbey, I pondered silver’s chemistry. After all, I research the chemistry of silver released into the …
Spring is here. In the forests of the Midwest, frogs are waking from their hibernation. Many of these frogs, including the spring peeper (Pseudaris crucifer) and the wood frog (Rana sylvatica), hibernate below the bark of trees or beneath leaf litter on the forest …
How much time do you spend thinking about bees? I’m guessing any attention they do get is relegated to those occasions when a buzz, and the associated threat of pain, disrupts a summer picnic or a tranquil lounge by the pool. Would you be surprised …
My interest in biology stems from the level of complexity and organization found within a single cell. I was astonished to learn that if every DNA molecule in the human body was unwrapped, it would stretch to Pluto and back. Being the inquisitive student that I was, …
“Don’t forget the sunscreen!” The imperative cried before a trip to the beach is an important one, with the pasty white lotion saving many a sunbather from sunburns and damage from the sun’s UV rays, which can lead to skin cancer. Many of these lotions use small …
Even though I’ve lived here for two years, I still have conversations with friends in which I admit that I haven’t yet seen many of the attractions Chicago has to offer. As something of a homebody, sightseeing takes extra energy for me, but recently I visited …
Question: What do mustard, pickles, and hot peppers have in common? Answer: In addition to being united atop a properly dressed Chicago-style hot dog, each of the foods mentioned above – and an annual total of $15 billion in U.S. crops – is made possible by the …
For my nephew’s birthday, I got him a kit of experiments based on the science of glowing. He loved it and I think his mother was probably happy I opted for this one over the “gross science” kit (complete with toilet bowl shaped mixing device) that would have …
Like many Americans, I’ve lived under the assumption that the chemicals used in all sorts of everyday products are thoroughly tested and known to be safe. However, every so often, we’re reminded that this is not always the case. Over the past few years, we’ve …
You just got home after a long day of work and you slip off your shoes, contemplating the options for dinner. But before you can even make it to the kitchen, a sudden odor sweeps over the room—something akin to sour milk and fertilizer. Your warm, moist socks, and …
It is always interesting when the bright beam of modern research turns to highlight age-old wisdom. Since my childhood, I have been familiar with the adage that says, “You are what you eat,” but it wasn’t until adult years that I realized the real truth of the phrase …
When I was visiting family this past week, my mother-in-law shared with us how she uses her Fitbit to keep track of how much she exercises, how well she sleeps, what she has been eating, and other lifestyle information. The numbers she watches—her number of steps …
Viruses are capable of creating havoc. Sometimes when I think about viruses, I get a picture of a massive outbreak. Usually this picture isn’t the nearly apocalyptic public health nightmare that’s depicted in the movie “Contagion,” but it’s still …
About 20 years ago, Miller and Coen published “The Case for Music in the Schools.” In this article, they noted that 66 percent of music major applicants were accepted into medical schools, whereas only 44 percent of biochemistry majors got in. The authors speculated …
If you were one of the millions of people to go see last summer’s blockbuster film “The Fault in Our Stars,” based off the novel of the same name by John Green, you might have been struck by a piece of mathematical wisdom uttered near the end of the …
If you are particularly unlucky, you may have at some point found yourself “bumped” from a flight – that is to say, you were kicked off and most likely left stranded. There are lots of reasons why this might happen, the most common being that the airline overbooked …
Most flights have at least a few minutes of bumpiness (in my experience, always as the food is served). Some of us think it’s interesting and perhaps fun – but most flyers, of course, do not. Either way, it’s nothing to get excited about. So, what exactly causes …
When it comes to food, there are two types of people in this world: those who EAT TO LIVE and those who LIVE TO EAT. I, unapologetically, belong to the second group. I am a foodie through and through! If I hadn’t become a scientist, I would have …
I have a love-hate relationship with my hair. It’s been that way ever since I can remember because I was born with curly hair. I know what you must be thinking: curly hair is beautiful and interesting! That may be so but it can also be incredibly temperamental, frizzy …
Have you ever known someone with perfect pitch? It’s the ability to immediately recognize whatever note they hear, along with the ability to tell if a note is even one hertz out of tune. It isn’t really something that you can teach yourself, either – you have …
My apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but it ended up on the wrong side of the fence. My family is filled with chemists. My mother has a BS in Chemistry, while my father and stepfather both have PhDs in Chemistry. My step-grandfather is an emeritus professor of …
There is a lot of news recently about new planets , and the number of them that might be able to harbor life , based on the number of stars and how many of them have planets in the ” habitable zone “. In reading about these values, I wondered a really simple question. …
On July 25, Google’s homepage doodle commemorated the birthday of Dr. Rosalind Franklin, who would have been 93 years old. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Dr. Franklin was before seeing the doodle, but fortunately the Internet was able …
The Hobbit was one of my favorite books as a kid, so I was really excited last year when the new movie version was released. I was a bit surprised when I went to buy tickets, though: there were six different versions of the film playing at the theater in …
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I love video games. I’m a grown man, with a wife and bills and responsibilities, but I still make time on a regular basis (I’m not going to admit how often, lest my advisors read this) to fire up Halo 4, sign on to …
Like a lot of young men today, and like my father before me, I have a beard. My beard is full and awesome, and it has really become a part of my identity over the last decade. A few years ago, I had an unfortunate shaving accident that left me without a proper beard …
My neighbors have two young children, and it seems like every time I visit, the kids have learned a dozen new words that they’re eager to show off. I ran into them the other day, and I found out that one of the new words their youngest child had acquired was a …
No one’s about to claim that the Holocaust was a good idea. Or that gang rapes are advisable. Or even that bar fights are predicated on anything but group idiocy. Trampling people in evacuations and running them over in Wal-Mart sprees just isn’t cool, no …
“What happened to your thumb?” “Did you accidentally smash it in the door?”A thumb was outstretched in the circle of sixth-graders. It had a most peculiar shape, being relatively thin and normal near the base, and then suddenly capped off with a bulbous, short tip, …
That’s right – that nasty-looking, flesh-eating, antibiotic resistant infection that is on the rise across the nation has stricken the armpit and face of two of my family members in the past year. It all started over Labor Day weekend last September. My sister called …
I’ll admit, as a student of science, I have a tendency to assume some degree of validity and accuracy in my reading and work. But recently I came across a podcast from NPR’s Radiolab which dramatically shook the foundations of my …
In the movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka invents a gum that consists of a three course meal including blueberry pie for dessert. Because the gum is not yet ready for consumption, Willy Wonka forbids Violet Beauregarde from trying it. However, …
By: Noah Rowland The ability to do math has long been thought of as a purely human trait – it comes with the whole higher-intelligence thing. But what if the ability to do math wasn’t as restricted to our makeup as we thought? Are we really as special as we think we are, or is […]
The ability to do math has long been thought of as a purely human trait – it comes with the whole higher-intelligence thing. But what if the ability to do math wasn’t as restricted to our makeup as we thought? Are we really as special as we think we are, or is our …
In Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World (1932), human beings are selectively bred to be genetically perfect. Based on their genes, they are sorted into a caste system that defines their social hierarchy. While capturing the scientifically misguided notions …
Recycling plastics for a greener future By: Molly Sun Every day, I cook up something new – fresh biscuits, fettuccine, and even soft-serve ice cream. But none of my creations are edible. The fluffy biscuits are buttery-yellow polyurethane foam, deceptively warm and soft. The fettuccine noodles are long, brittle strands of polyurethane film with a […]
A senior astrophysicist at the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor at Northwestern, Kalogera digs into why she keeps coming back to astrophysics, after more than three decades in astronomy. By: Katie Liu The universe chirped on a Monday. The first indication that astronomical history had been made came in the […]
By: Christian Elliott A shorter version of this story ran in Sierra Magazine on December 4, 2022. Dennis Whigham closes the car door, straightens his blue baseball cap and squints into the woodland before him. A maze of planks crisscrosses a forest floor covered with cables and hoses. Little yellow flags wave in the breeze […]
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,” …
Graduate student Matthew Verosloff, hangs by one arm off a dirt ledge as he leans his body over the edge of a river. His free arm is reaching down with a test tube to collect a sample of water. He’s in Costa Rica escaping the frigid cold of winter in Chicago …
As 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 …
As 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 …
It’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 …
As 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 …
A 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 …
It’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 …
Contemporary 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 …
What 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 …
Tent, 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 …
When an oven bakes you can feel the heat, and on a stovetop you can see the flames emanating from the surface. A microwave oven, on the other hand, can cook food quickly, without any visible source of heat. They work because of the type of radiation …
As of now, I’m two-thirds of the way toward one of my life goals: making (and eating) an entirely homegrown Caprese. Popular in Italian-American eateries, Caprese (cuh-pray-say) salad – affectionately known as “tomato-mozz” in my family – is actually devoid of any true …
The Rio 2016 Olympiad opened with a bang Friday night. Over opening weekend, though, the gymnasts and swimmers of Team USA brought more than just game faces to the arena. Athletes, including swimming superstar Michael Phelps, have been …
I recently helped polish silver for a fancy dinner party. While I rubbed purple-gray paste over the tines of the forks, feeling a little like a maid in Downton Abbey, I pondered silver’s chemistry. After all, I research the chemistry of silver released into the …
Spring is here. In the forests of the Midwest, frogs are waking from their hibernation. Many of these frogs, including the spring peeper (Pseudaris crucifer) and the wood frog (Rana sylvatica), hibernate below the bark of trees or beneath leaf litter on the forest …
How much time do you spend thinking about bees? I’m guessing any attention they do get is relegated to those occasions when a buzz, and the associated threat of pain, disrupts a summer picnic or a tranquil lounge by the pool. Would you be surprised …
My interest in biology stems from the level of complexity and organization found within a single cell. I was astonished to learn that if every DNA molecule in the human body was unwrapped, it would stretch to Pluto and back. Being the inquisitive student that I was, …
“Don’t forget the sunscreen!” The imperative cried before a trip to the beach is an important one, with the pasty white lotion saving many a sunbather from sunburns and damage from the sun’s UV rays, which can lead to skin cancer. Many of these lotions use small …
Even though I’ve lived here for two years, I still have conversations with friends in which I admit that I haven’t yet seen many of the attractions Chicago has to offer. As something of a homebody, sightseeing takes extra energy for me, but recently I visited …
Question: What do mustard, pickles, and hot peppers have in common? Answer: In addition to being united atop a properly dressed Chicago-style hot dog, each of the foods mentioned above – and an annual total of $15 billion in U.S. crops – is made possible by the …
For my nephew’s birthday, I got him a kit of experiments based on the science of glowing. He loved it and I think his mother was probably happy I opted for this one over the “gross science” kit (complete with toilet bowl shaped mixing device) that would have …
Like many Americans, I’ve lived under the assumption that the chemicals used in all sorts of everyday products are thoroughly tested and known to be safe. However, every so often, we’re reminded that this is not always the case. Over the past few years, we’ve …
You just got home after a long day of work and you slip off your shoes, contemplating the options for dinner. But before you can even make it to the kitchen, a sudden odor sweeps over the room—something akin to sour milk and fertilizer. Your warm, moist socks, and …
It is always interesting when the bright beam of modern research turns to highlight age-old wisdom. Since my childhood, I have been familiar with the adage that says, “You are what you eat,” but it wasn’t until adult years that I realized the real truth of the phrase …
When I was visiting family this past week, my mother-in-law shared with us how she uses her Fitbit to keep track of how much she exercises, how well she sleeps, what she has been eating, and other lifestyle information. The numbers she watches—her number of steps …
Viruses are capable of creating havoc. Sometimes when I think about viruses, I get a picture of a massive outbreak. Usually this picture isn’t the nearly apocalyptic public health nightmare that’s depicted in the movie “Contagion,” but it’s still …
About 20 years ago, Miller and Coen published “The Case for Music in the Schools.” In this article, they noted that 66 percent of music major applicants were accepted into medical schools, whereas only 44 percent of biochemistry majors got in. The authors speculated …
If you were one of the millions of people to go see last summer’s blockbuster film “The Fault in Our Stars,” based off the novel of the same name by John Green, you might have been struck by a piece of mathematical wisdom uttered near the end of the …
If you are particularly unlucky, you may have at some point found yourself “bumped” from a flight – that is to say, you were kicked off and most likely left stranded. There are lots of reasons why this might happen, the most common being that the airline overbooked …
Most flights have at least a few minutes of bumpiness (in my experience, always as the food is served). Some of us think it’s interesting and perhaps fun – but most flyers, of course, do not. Either way, it’s nothing to get excited about. So, what exactly causes …
When it comes to food, there are two types of people in this world: those who EAT TO LIVE and those who LIVE TO EAT. I, unapologetically, belong to the second group. I am a foodie through and through! If I hadn’t become a scientist, I would have …
I have a love-hate relationship with my hair. It’s been that way ever since I can remember because I was born with curly hair. I know what you must be thinking: curly hair is beautiful and interesting! That may be so but it can also be incredibly temperamental, frizzy …
Have you ever known someone with perfect pitch? It’s the ability to immediately recognize whatever note they hear, along with the ability to tell if a note is even one hertz out of tune. It isn’t really something that you can teach yourself, either – you have …
My apple didn’t fall far from the tree, but it ended up on the wrong side of the fence. My family is filled with chemists. My mother has a BS in Chemistry, while my father and stepfather both have PhDs in Chemistry. My step-grandfather is an emeritus professor of …
There is a lot of news recently about new planets , and the number of them that might be able to harbor life , based on the number of stars and how many of them have planets in the ” habitable zone “. In reading about these values, I wondered a really simple question. …
On July 25, Google’s homepage doodle commemorated the birthday of Dr. Rosalind Franklin, who would have been 93 years old. I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know who Dr. Franklin was before seeing the doodle, but fortunately the Internet was able …
The Hobbit was one of my favorite books as a kid, so I was really excited last year when the new movie version was released. I was a bit surprised when I went to buy tickets, though: there were six different versions of the film playing at the theater in …
I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I love video games. I’m a grown man, with a wife and bills and responsibilities, but I still make time on a regular basis (I’m not going to admit how often, lest my advisors read this) to fire up Halo 4, sign on to …
Like a lot of young men today, and like my father before me, I have a beard. My beard is full and awesome, and it has really become a part of my identity over the last decade. A few years ago, I had an unfortunate shaving accident that left me without a proper beard …
My neighbors have two young children, and it seems like every time I visit, the kids have learned a dozen new words that they’re eager to show off. I ran into them the other day, and I found out that one of the new words their youngest child had acquired was a …
No one’s about to claim that the Holocaust was a good idea. Or that gang rapes are advisable. Or even that bar fights are predicated on anything but group idiocy. Trampling people in evacuations and running them over in Wal-Mart sprees just isn’t cool, no …
“What happened to your thumb?” “Did you accidentally smash it in the door?”A thumb was outstretched in the circle of sixth-graders. It had a most peculiar shape, being relatively thin and normal near the base, and then suddenly capped off with a bulbous, short tip, …
That’s right – that nasty-looking, flesh-eating, antibiotic resistant infection that is on the rise across the nation has stricken the armpit and face of two of my family members in the past year. It all started over Labor Day weekend last September. My sister called …
I’ll admit, as a student of science, I have a tendency to assume some degree of validity and accuracy in my reading and work. But recently I came across a podcast from NPR’s Radiolab which dramatically shook the foundations of my …
In Aldous Huxley’s futuristic novel Brave New World (1932), human beings are selectively bred to be genetically perfect. Based on their genes, they are sorted into a caste system that defines their social hierarchy. While capturing the scientifically misguided notions …