I think one of the beauties of science that is poorly understood by the lay community is it’s ability to distinguish what is true from what makes sense. Although western educational institutions were founded along Aristotelian lines, Aristotle wasn’t an experimentalist. His worldview was created from a self-consistent logic. Looks nice, but it’s just not Read More

If you’re in a spot where you need to generate “legally defensive and accurate data” — as is the Collier County, Florida Pollution Control & Prevention Lab — then you want to be sure you’ve got the apparatus and expertise on hand to do whatever needs to be done. That includes various analyses on groundwater Read More

If you want to do comparative studies, you’ve got to be sure the measurements you’re making are, well, comparable. For example, if you want to compare the characteristics of different soils, or examine the evolution of soil over time, then you can’t go measuring nitrogen in one place, phosphorus in another, and dry weight in Read More

I understand the importance of this line of research, but it still doesn’t sound like fun. Researchers at Chengdu Medical College in Sichuan Province, China, evaluated the effectiveness of three different methods of partial intestinal obstruction in rat models. Partial intestinal obstruction is a common side effect of abdominal surgery, and they wanted to select Read More

It’s kind of obvious that nanomaterials get many of their unique (and useful) properties from their size — sometimes the fact that quantum properties dominate, sometimes the surface to volume ratio, sometimes simply because of the overall surface area.  Those features combine to give nanoparticles significantly different properties than the bulk materials of which they Read More

When I have to look in the dictionary three times during the first paragraph of an abstract, I know I’m in for a bit of a challenge.  That was true for recent paper from a team of Sri Lankan and American researchers on “Physiological Epicotyl Dormancy and Recalcitrant Storage Behaviour.” The specific objects of study Read More

It seems amazing that we would risk our health for the sake of our appearance, but apparently that’s what happens with some people who dye their hair.  According to a paper from a team led by a University of Queensland, Australia, researcher, lead acetate is a component of hair dyes.  It’s also implicated in (among Read More

There are many ways of evaluating plant health, but most of them are productivity endpoints: mass or volume of growth, protein content, or something similar.  A research team led by the  Universidade de Aveiro in Aveiro, Portugal, investigated the utility of some alternative endpoints such as chlorophyll fluorescence, pigment content, content of malondialdehyde and proline, Read More

There’s always a conflict between not fixing it if it ain’t broke and with riding the wave of progress. That conflict holds in technical fields as well, where you have to balance the confidence of a tried and true method against the efficiency and potentially increased accuracy.  An example of a resolution of that conflict Read More

Turns out that measuring the amount of water used by crops is a valuable tool for managing agricultural production. It also turns out that there’s a pretty good tool for that: the soil moisture neutron probe.  One more “turn out”: turns out new regulatory requirements make it impractical to use the soil moisture neutron probe Read More