His Majesty’s Ship Beagle is among the most celebrated of all British warships, commissioned in 1820 as a Cherokee Class, 10-gun brig-sloop. I always thought that it was odd to name a ship after a dog, unless of course there was an actual Mr. or Mrs. Beagle around back then who was worthy of … Read more
This is an odd title and I am stuck with it. Worse, I am compelled to explain why this is so. Today, I am at a loss what to choose for my next blog entry and trying to find motivation to write about scientific topics of interest to me – malaria, repellents, arsenic poisoning, the … Read more
This blog entry has its origins from a company newsletter I wrote in 2009 for scientists working on marine coatings. Darlene Brezinski, the editor of Paint & Coatings Industry magazine, liked the topic so much and asked me to take excerpts from that newsletter into the article that appeared in the magazine on the same … Read more
When I think of hibernation, my first thought is my high school English literature class on Washington Irving’s tale of a Dutch settler named Rip Van Winkle. The story’s setting is New York’s Catskills Mountains during the American Revolutionary period. In this tale, Rip Van Winkle was a fun-loving, lazy, henpecked husband who escaped his … Read more