Emma Sconyers

A Science Book that’s Easy to Stomach

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A review of Gulp, by Mary Roach
W.W. Norton & Co., 2013
352 pages

You probably never wanted to know what raw whale skin tastes like (slightly nutty). Or, for that matter, the history of enemas in convents (the nuns rather enjoyed them). The beauty of Mary Roach’s new book Gulp is that she doesn’t really care what you want to know. Her newest endeavor was to research the digestive system and she has gleefully brought us a long for the ride. Her curiosity about gross-out subjects like feces, vomit, and entrails is infectiously delightful. You’ll find yourself laughing out loud and sharing her fascinating anecdotes over dinner—though you may lose sight of what is considered polite mealtime conversation. Full Review »

Neither Here, Nor There

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The 25-year-old Werner Heisenberg stood screaming at his mentor Neils Bohr, cutting him down with insults. At one point tears were streaming down his face, frustration building up in every fiber of his body. Heisenberg’s radical idea would not—could not—get through to Bohr. Bohr insisted he was wrong, even demanding he revoke his paper.  But Heisenberg was relentless. No one seemed to grasp the momentous discovery he had just made. Electrons were there, and yet they weren’t. Heisenberg had realized their uncertainty. Full Article »

Believing Is Not Always Seeing

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Out in the cosmos trillions of miles away looms a planet one and a half times as large as Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Kepler 7-b, an exoplanet circling a neighboring star, cannot be seen directly with current instruments. And yet, scientists at MIT now insist that the planet is covered with swirling clouds. How do they know?

Two years ago, the team only had a small amount of data from NASA’s orbiting telescope Kepler (for which the planet is named), which picks up pinpricks of light reflected from other solar systems. The Kepler telescope tracked Kepler 7-b’s orbit by recording its transit pattern –measurements of light at every orbital phase—as it circled its own star. Scientists noticed a region on Kepler 7-b was reflecting an unusual amount of light; though with limited information there was no way pinpoint whether it was clouds causing the reflections, Rayleigh scattering (the same phenomena that refracts light in our atmosphere and turns our sky blue), or heat from thermal emissions. Full Article »

Death on the Lake

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Thousands of dead water birds have washed up year after year on the pristine shorelines of Lake Michigan without a hint at the location of their demise. The birds are getting infected with the botulism toxin, but scientists have been stumped as to where they’re picking up the bacterium. Now there may finally be a way to solve the nearly 50 year old mystery of where they are getting sick.

By reversing methods used to track human bodies blown overboard from ships, researcher Kevin Kenow, a biologist at the United States Geological Survey, believes scientists can retrace the last moments of these birds’ lives to pinpoint where they are being infected with the deadly neurotoxin botulism. Full Article »

The Color of Words

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Is the letter J a shade of tangerine or is it more grassy green?

New research suggests that the 1-2% of the population with an unusual condition that causes the brain to see letters and numbers in a rainbow of colors don’t have an inborn sixth sense; they develop their character-color associations over time.

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which experiencing one sense leads to an automatic, involuntary experience in another. For example, there are people who taste sounds and people who see music. The condition runs in families, although the exact gene or genes involved have yet to be discovered. Full Article »

Sex, Genes and Safer Pregnancies

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If you haven’t had the terrible experience of experiencing the sometimes fatal disease personally or witnessed a loved one rushed to the ER after developing symptoms, you might have witnessed it on the popular television drama Downtown Abbey. The death of a Crowley sister following back-breaking seizures and sky rocketing blood pressure shocked viewers around the world.

The BBC didn’t dramatize a rare, outdated disease to drum up ratings. “3-5% of pregnancies will develop preeclampsia. And that increases to 8% of all first time births,” explains James Roberts, an NIH researcher studying the condition.

Now, researchers from Brown University and the University of Iowa have reconfirmed that as a woman comes in contact with her partner’s semen, that contact may produce as much as a 70% reduction in the risk of preeclampsia.

Previous studies had seen similar outcomes, but this study went a step farther, showing that certain immunity genes provided an early warning for development of the disorder. Full Article »

Introducing Suzanne Jacobs

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