Sunday, November 21, 2010

Sex Appeal

Women seeking short-term relationships like men with facial scars. * Oh, that cave man look (women still fall for it). * Why cosmetics work (it's about contrast). * Hamburger makeup artistry. * Nefertiti's eye makeup, and the face cream preferred by ancient Rome's women. * Neanderthal cosmetics. * What a computer likes to see in a woman. * Soft, touchable skin for robots. * Wasps that wear makeup suffer a rude awakening. * Shoppers buy more from attractive sales people. * A woman's belly button may signal her mating potential (and outies are out). * When penis enhancement surgery goes awry. * The future of cosmetics (bioengineered skin color). * Etc.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

In Discover Magazine This Month: What Happens in Las Vegas Gets Flipped by Plate Techtonics

In November's Discover Magazine:

Just a few miles from the perfectly enclosed, artificial worlds of the Strip's casinos, there lie some beautiful and accessible spectacles of nature.

See article.

Friday, July 02, 2010

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Nanotechnologoy

In the July-August issue of Discover Magazine:

1 Get small. A nanometer is about the width of a strand of DNA; if you design, build, or use functional systems smaller than 100 of these, you’re a nanotechnologist.

2 By that definition, we have been doing nanotech for centuries. For instance, the colors in medieval stained glass windows result from nanocrystals created in the heating and cooling of the glass.
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3 Size matters. At the nano scale, materials take on unusual properties. Their color, transparency, and melting point often differ significantly from those of larger clumps of the same stuff.

See "things" 4-20.

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Dogs

In June's Discover Magazine:

1 The sultry “dog days of summer” get their name from ancient astronomers who noticed that those days coincide with the period when Sirius, the Dog Star, rises at the same time as the sun.

2 Bad astronomy: Sirius is the brightest star in the sky, but it is just one 10-billionth as bright as the sun and has no effect on our weather.

3 Nerd. Fido will touch his nose to a computer screen if it has a picture of a dog on it but not if it shows a landscape, University of Vienna researchers have found.

See "things" 4-20.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

In Discover Magazine This Month: 20 Things You Didn't Know about Water

In May's Discover Magazine:

1 Water is everywhere—there are 332,500,000 cubic miles of it on the earth’s surface. But less than 1 percent of it is fresh and accessible, even when you include bottled water.

2 And “fresh” can be a relative term. Before 2009, federal regulators did not require water bottlers to remove E. coli.

3 Actually, E. coli doesn’t sound so bad. In 1999 the Natural Resources Defense Council found that one brand of spring water came from a well in an industrial parking lot near a hazardous waste dump.

See 4-20.

Friday, April 02, 2010

In Discover Magazine This Month: The Best Adventures, Museums, and Nightspots of the Year

In May's Discover Magazine:

DESTINATION SCIENCE: CAYMAN TRENCH, CARIBBEAN Scuba diving into the abyss.

The Cayman Trench, a nearly five-mile-deep, 155-mile-wide basin running from the southeastern tip of Cuba toward Guatemala, is many things to many people. To veteran divers, it is a not yet fully explored mystery zone. To oceanographers, it is one of the deepest parts of the Caribbean. To geologists, it is a volatile subduction trench, part of the geologically complex boundary between the North American and Caribbean tectonic plates....

Read the article.