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Dry Water? Let’s whet your appetite for some science.

1 Dec 2023

The poem, “My country”, by Dorothea MacKellar, is recited by every preschooler in Australia. One line is of particular relevance:  “A land of droughts and flooding rains”. 

A Farmer, Epsom Salt, Moses, and some Sweet Chemistry

6 Sep 2023

In 1618 a farmer in England noticed that he could lead his cows to water but could not make them drink. He tasted the well water himself and realized right away that there was some wisdom to the...

Dowsing: Dowse It Work?

17 Mar 2023

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose. Although we live in a world driven by technology, we are always one cataclysm away from retreating to magical notions. Climate change is...

They are abbreviated as PFAS-are they destined to abbreviate our lives?

1 Mar 2023

“Not everything that can be counted, counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” That quote is commonly attributed to Einstein although there is no evidence he ever said it. Even if he...

Is it true that Archimedes formulated his famous principle based on an observation he made as he immersed himself in a bath?

4 Mar 2022

Archimedes’ principle states that any object, totally or partially immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object. But. it was not the...

Is there a difference between real snow and "artificial snow"?

17 Feb 2022

Snow-making machines actually make tiny beads of ice, each one about one ten-thousandth of an inch in diameter. Water is sprayed from a hose together with compressed air. The air is needed because...

Is there any point in drinking oxygenated water?

23 Dec 2021

Oxygen is critical for life and that also makes is susceptible to chicanery. If oxygen is so essential that the brain is permanently injured after just four minutes of deprivation, then surely more...

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