Subscribe to the OSS Weekly Newsletter!

Register for the OSS 25th Anniversary Event

Putting Up with the Farts: A Story of Our Ancestors and the Animal Milk They Loved

26 Aug 2022

Flatulence has been immortalized in this children’s song: “Beans, beans, the musical fruit / The more you eat, the more you toot.” The same can be said of milk for those of us with lactose...

The World’s First Commercially Available Laundry Powder

28 Jul 2022

It was a scientific breakthrough. Persil, introduced by the German company Henkel in 1907 was the world’s first laundry powder. The name derives from perborate and silicate, two key components in...

The Enigma of “Evidence-Based Medicine”

12 Jul 2022

I know what you’re thinking. If not evidence-based, what else could medicine be? Well, it could be based on conjecture, hearsay, wishful thinking, anecdote or just plain flim-flam. Indeed,...

“Pasteur’s Bacterial Culture” and “Coley’s toxins”: Anomalies and Landmark Discoveries

26 Apr 2022

By 1878, Louis Pasteur had formulated his germ theory of disease and had turned his attention to chicken cholera, a problem that plagued the French poultry industry. He managed to isolate a microbe...

Passing Over the Exodus Story

13 Apr 2022

Can you imagine eating 78 matzah balls in 8 minutes? That’s about 4,000 calories and 2,700 mg of cholesterol! Joey Chestnut accomplished that monumental feat back in 2008 at the Inaugural World...

Bunnies and Cancer

12 Apr 2022

Dr. Katsusaburo Yamagiwa, a Japanese pathologist at Imperial Tokyo University, and his research assistant, Dr. Koichi Ichikawa, carried out an experiment in which they repeatedly painted the inner...

Immortality in the Lab: How One Woman’s Cells Changed Medicine and Ethics

8 Apr 2022

Trust can disappear in an instant and take generations to gain back. The story of Henrietta Lacks’ immortal cancer cells is a stark reminder of that. Its loud echoes partly inform our present, as...

Learning From The Movies

18 Mar 2022

Both groups struggled with the same problem. How to extract and purify a chemical that is part of a complex mixture? For researchers led by Dr. Frederick Banting at the University of Toronto in...

Is it true that Archimedes formulated his famous principle based on an observation he made as he immersed himself in a bath?

4 Mar 2022

Archimedes’ principle states that any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. But. it was not the...

Pages

Back to top