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Mitochondria: A Story of Mothers, Teenagers, and Energy

30 Sep 2022

Certain concepts simply irk me. They are often needlessly complicated and their meaning gets distorted in an attempt to make them understandable. Take, for example, the idea of a Mitochondrial Eve.

Teaching is also Learning

16 Aug 2022

I have spent many years teaching chemistry to high school students and always enjoyed carrying out demonstrations. For students, watching chemicals perform their magic live is far more memorable...

Luciferin and GFP: The Fluorescent Chemicals Used by Insects, Sea Creatures and Humans!

11 Aug 2022

Eons ago in a remote village in China, a promising young lad was studying for the almighty civil service registry exam. His parents were too poor to afford an oil-burning lamp so that he could read...

Do our brains see what our eyes see?

10 Aug 2022

For the past month, I have been road-tripping across Canada. Along the way, I’ve seen vast grasslands, snow-capped mountains, and beautiful lakes. And mirages! A mirage is a type of optical...

Nail Polish that Smells like Cheese

9 Aug 2022

Food-scented beauty products first appeared in the late 1930s when customers were enticed by Harriet Hubbard Ayer’s clove-scented lipstick, Demeter’s pizza-scented perfume, and banana-scented...

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...

La Cucaracha

27 Jul 2022

“Crazy bug!” That’s what the Spanish "cucaracha" means. Why crazy? Because when these darkness-loving bugs are surprised by a light being turned on, they scamper away in a wild, crazy, zig-zag...

Fire Up That Barbecue!

20 Jul 2022

The word “barbecue” derives from the ancient Caribbean tradition of supporting food over a fire with a scaffolding made from green wood which in Spanish was called "barbacoa." The technique itself...

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