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Edison's Inadvertant Folly

9 Dec 2022

It all started in Bavaria, southern Germany, 1895. Dr. Roentgen, a physicist, noticed a spooky greenish ray seeping through the completely sealed test tube and projected onto the screen wall. What...

When the Cows Come Home to Radioactive Ranches

18 Nov 2022

A magnitude 9.1 earthquake occurred just off the northeast coast of Japan on March 11th, 2011, at 14:46 local time. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, like all nuclear power plants in Japan...

There Is More to Acetone Than Removing Nail Polish

2 Nov 2022

Say acetone, and what comes to a chemist’s mind? Washing laboratory glassware is a good bet. Actually, the prime use of acetone is to produce polymethyl methacrylate, better known as Plexiglas....

Remembering Houdini

26 Oct 2022

For many years members of the American Society of Magicians gathered on October 31 at Machpelah Cemetery in New York to break a magic wand over the grave of the man whose name is synonymous with...

Forget the Willow Bark Extract — Go For Aspirin

28 Sep 2022

Contrary to popular belief, aspirin does not occur in nature, it is not found in the willow tree. But there is a connection. Aspirin, or acetyl salicylic acid, was first produced commercially by...

Anesthesia a la Reine

21 Sep 2022

Queen Victoria was the first monarch to give birth to a child under anesthesia. Prince Leopold, the Queen’s eighth child, was born in 1853 after her physician Dr. John Snow had administered...

Odysseus’ Snowdrop Odyssey

14 Sep 2022

Circe was the sorceress in Greek mythology who drugged Odysseus’ crew to make them forget their homeland, then proceeded to turn the men into swine. When Odysseus set out to rescue his crew, he...

Coffee: To Drink or Not To Drink, That Is The Question.

7 Sep 2022

Coffee first appeared in Canadian cups about two hundred years ago, some three hundred years after people in Africa and the Middle East were regularly consuming the beverage. The most popular...

The Bottle Jumper

31 Aug 2022

The scene was a street corner in London sometime in the 17th century. A skeptical crowd had gathered to see if the performer could deliver on his promise to pour whatever drink asked for, be it...

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