I thought to tackle a much lighter topic than aging, cancer, toxic spills and malaria for a change of pace, especially since Christmas is getting closer and need some happier thoughts. Today’s blog will have less to do with biology and more into a topic of great personal interest since I was 4 years … Read more
A black man was killed a few days ago. No, it’s not gang violence. It’s neither drug related nor a party in the ‘housing projects’ gone out of hand. It’s not an accidental shooting or from a robbery gone astray. Nor was it even a traffic accident. Most people would have said that he had … Read more
The thought of aging, as a young man, was farthest from my mind. It was something my parents and others were going through, not me. That mindset was a long, long time ago. Now it’s different. As I think about the aging process today, three things come to mind: Mt. Colden; the 7-year itch; and an idea about aging from the past.
Relax. This is not another story of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is even more up close and personal—it’s the daily oil spill on your skin. It’s the middle of the New York summer. You sweat profusely most of the time. Worse, your natural skin oils … Read more
Fracking ! Sounds like a curse word, and for some people along the Marcellus Shale regions between New York and West Virginia, it already is. Or, it may sound something like an illegal activity folks engage in somewhere in a dark back alley. And, that also reminds me of the word “fragging” used by … Read more
The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy From the Scots poem by Robert Burns, 1785, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with a Plough For almost two decades, there has never been a spill of any … Read more
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