Month: January 2021

Enlarge / A housewife proudly presents her indispensable Pyrex kitchenware (1955). Ainissa Ramirez tells the story of its invention, and how it molded human behavior in turn, in her book, The Alchemy of Us. (credit: Chaloner Woods/Getty Images)

There's rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, we're once again running a special Twelve Days of Christmas series of posts, highlighting one science story that fell through the cracks in 2020, each day from December 25 through January 5. Today: Kick off the new year with physicist and "science evangelist" Ainissa Ramirez as she tells engaging stories about materials science, the technologies it enables, and how those technologies impact human behavior in her book, The Alchemy of Us.

The American 19th century entrepreneur Thomas Edison is perhaps most famous for his development of the incandescent light bulb, but few people likely know that part of his inspiration came from an obscure fellow inventor in Connecticut named William Wallace. Edison visited Wallace's workshop on September 8, 1878, to check out the latter's prototype "arc light" system. Edison was impressed, but he thought he could improve on the system, which used a steam-powered dynamo to produce an incredibly bright light—much too bright for household use, more akin to outdoor floodlights. The result was the gentle glow of the incandescent bulb.

Other inventors had come up with versions of an incandescent lamp prior to Edison, but the Menlo Park wizard discovered an excellent incandescent material in carbonized bamboo that lasted for over 1000 hours, and also devised a fully integrated system of electric lighting to drive adoption of this new technology. Edison found a material he could shape to his needs. But electric lighting would in turn shape how people slept, as physicist and self-described "science evangelist" Ainissa Ramirez explains in her book, The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, released in April.

Enlarge / That stuff floating in the water is exactly what you think it is. (credit: Jeff Gritchen/Orange County Register)

When we saw the memes scoring the size of a blue whale’s anus second to some of the year’s most reviled politicians, our first thought was that it was deliciously funny. Naturally, our next thought was, “Is this true?” and “How big is a blue whale’s anus, anyway?"

The first obstacle getting an answer to these pressing questions was persuading scientists to answer interview requests. One admitted that at first, he assumed his colleagues were messing with him. Once convinced our request was not a joke, the situation improved only slightly.

“Most of the data that we have on large whale species comes from back in the day when we used to kill a lot of them,” says Dr. Mark Leslie, a visiting marine biology professor at Swarthmore College. And by “a lot” Leslie refers to a whaling industry that killed 2 million to 3 million blue whales, likely restructured marine ecosystems, and nearly drove them extinct. “And to be honest,” Leslie says, “there wasn't a whole lot of interest in an anuses.”

Hmm, we're sensing a trend here... (credit: Kerry Callen)

Update, 1/1/21: It's New Year's Day, and Ars staff is still enjoying some necessary downtime to prepare for a new year (and a slew of CES emails, we're sure). While that happens, we're resurfacing some vintage Ars stories like this 2014 examination of a classic comic book claim, "The Battle of the Century." This piece was first published on December 10, 2014, and it appears unchanged below.

Here's one of those hidden-in-plain-sight industry secrets: headlines sell. Whether it's cover lines on your favorite magazine, the title of a new novel, or headlines on Ars and elsewhere, good display text should draw readers in and spell out what's coming.

When it comes to headlines and 20th century comic books, there's one phrase that keeps popping up. Several books—not, one, not two, not three—boldly claim the title of "The Battle of the Century" on their covers. But since that 100 years is now behind us, we can look back to decide which truly was the Battle of the Century (and possibly call everyone else a liar).

Enlarge (credit: Ted Horowitz | Getty Images)

One of the astonishing aspects of the human response to the Covid-19 pandemic has been how quickly scientists pivoted to studying every facet of the virus in order to mitigate the loss of life and plan for a return to normalcy. At the same time, a lot of non-coronavirus research ground to a near halt.

With research labs and offices shuttered for all but essential workers, many scientists were stuck at home, their fieldwork and meetings canceled and planned experiments kicked down the road as they struggled to figure out how to keep their research programs going. Many took the opportunity to catch up on writing grants and papers; some—in between caring for kids—came up with strategic workarounds to keep the scientific juices flowing.

To gauge how researchers in different fields are managing, Knowable Magazine spoke with an array of scientists and technical staff—among thema specialist keeping alive genetically important strains of fruit flies, the maintenance chief of an astronomical observatory working to keep telescopes safe and on standby during the lockdown, and a pediatrician struggling to manage clinical trials for a rare genetic disease. Here are a few slices of scientific life during the pandemic.