We know that human activity is introducing changes to our environment — just look at the exhaust from a smokestack or the effluvium from a waste discharge pipe if you doubt it — but just because something new is introduced into an environment does not mean that “something” has a biological importance.  That’s where the Read More

The whole idea behind biomass fuels is that you replace a non-renewable resource with a renewable one.  But if the renewable resource you’re using is a food product, you aren’t really helping the overall balance of resources.  So ideally you’d like to use a non-food plant — such as birch and spruce.  The problem is Read More

“You are what you eat” is an aphorism that applies to more than just people.  Well, it might be, anyway. A U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher wanted to see if that was true for the saltbush — Atriplex canescens — growing in Utah and Oregon.  He examined the relationship among soil salinity and plant ash Read More

A lab freezer is often used to preserve the chemical stability of samples until they can be analyzed.  This removes a constraint on scheduling so that analysis can be done when apparatus and qualified personnel are available.  Lab freezers are also capable of storing things like lab personnel’s juice drinks.  Normally your safety organization would Read More

Lab freezers are often used to stabilize samples for later analysis, but seldom have they been as appropriately used as in a 2009 study led by Oregon State University researchers.  For this study, the samples in question are arctic ice cores pulled from the Greenland Ice Sheet.  Researchers pulled small samples from the ice cores, Read More

Pervious concrete is increasingly used for its environmental benefits.  It also reduces splashing, decreases road noise, and increases skid resistance.  Unfortunately, the same porosity that gives it all those advantages can also decrease its strength.  A paper published in the ACI materials journal highlights the efforts of a group of researchers to characterize its “ability, Read More

Learning cool little things is one of the most fun parts of what we do here, bringing you examples of the variety of applications for scientific apparatus. For example, did you know that male Euglossini (neotropical orchid bees) gather fragrant volatile compounds and store them in tiny pockets in their back legs?  Why, you ask? Read More

Here’s news: when people think you’re an idiot, you’re more likely to act like one.  All right, that’s not exactly what two University of Arizona researchers discovered, but it’s close.  They put a bunch of undergraduates in a no-win situation: they were given simple math problems, but if they made a mistake a docent would Read More

One direction of biology is moving towards understanding behavior on smaller and smaller scales.  For example, when a PhD student at Iowas State University wanted to investigate the way in which Baculoviridae-family alphabaculoviruses infect lepidoptera, she got way down.  Down past the fact that the viruses bind to the midgut of the midgut epithelium of Read More

If you wanted to develop a new apple varietal to succeed in northern climates you’d want to be sure it was attractive, tasty, and had a decent shelf life.  You’d also want to be certain it could do well in the cold.  A required tool for that kind of study is the laboratory freezer, which Read More