Wendy Science

A mixture of volatile organic compounds and histamine, a compound we produce during immune responses, could enable cheaper pest detection and control December 25, 2014 | and | Going against conventional wisdom, Regine Gries let the bedbugs bite. Going against conventional wisdom, let the bedbugs bite. A lot. The biologist let the pests in her laboratory feast on the blood in her forearms—to the tune of some 180,000 bites—in the name of science. In doing so, she’s helped discover a previously unidentified bedbug pheromone that could help identify and fight future infestations. When bedbugs move into a building, eradicating them is an expensive process fraught with anxiety and frustration. Many researchers are working on improving bedbug detection methods because existing techniques are often costly or too time consuming for routine monitoring. Some think that baiting traps with bedbug pheromones could provide an affordable way to detect infestations before they become severe. ...

YOUR DIRTY LITTLE MIND: Notice the naked nubile young women behind the orange occlusion (as if you hadn't already!)?Turn to page 23 to see the photograph without the masking. An amazing fact: most of what you see is a confabulation of your brain. Sounds hard to believe, right? After all, you are reading this page. So how inaccurate could your visual system be? Well, it is not that our eyes themselves are inaccurate … just that our brain makes stuff up based on the sparse data it gets from our eyes and then leads you down the garden path. Let's start with your retina. A terrible imaging device, by any engineer's estimation. So full of design flaws that it is essentially proof positive against intelligent design. The neural circuits that make up the human retina, and the blood vessels that feed them, sit between the eye's lens and the photoreceptors—which lie against the back of the eye. Light must travel through all this semitransparent machinery before photoreceptors c...

A large, extinct bird with a toothed beak is depicted in a reconstruction and a drawing of a fossil, 1915 More In This Article January 1965 Synapse Transmission . January 1915 Feeble-Minded? http://ift.tt/1CPOglO A Bird with Teeth Piltdown Skull . January 1865 Safety Match http://ift.tt/VqIg2z

Welcome teachers, librarians, homeschoolers and nonfiction writers! This blog offers innovative resources for teaching science and tips for writing nonfiction.

See Inside People with the inherited bleeding disorder haemophilia lack factors that cause the blood to clot. The disease affects thousands of people around the world and has even played a part in historic events Dec 16, 2014 | | COAGULATION CASCADE OF ALL THE PEOPLE WITH HAEMOPHILIA... THE ROYAL DISEASE INHERITANCE PATTERN TREATMENT TIMELINE

See Inside A new “motion microscope” reveals tiny changes in objects—and people—that appear to be stock-still The first microscopes, in the 1500s and 1600s, transformed glass panes that looked completely transparent into a universe teeming with bacteria, cells, pollen and intricate crystals. These visionary aids were the first devices to show people that there were cells within a drop of blood. Since then, microscopes have opened up other invisible worlds for scientists, going within cells or down to the scale of atoms. We believe a new kind of microscope is about to unveil another fascinating new world: a world of motion and color change too minute for the eye to catch. Blood pulsing through one's face makes it redder and then lighter, the wind can cause construction cranes to sway by a tiny amount, and a baby's breathing is often too subtle too be seen. These movements are almost unimaginably small, yet their importance looms large. They can reveal the state of our health or ...

Nylon production creates a greenhouse gas but combining ozone and UV light eliminates it December 24, 2014 | and | Mimicking the breakdown of atmospheric organic compounds has led to a cleaner way to make a key nylon raw material. Mimicking the breakdown of atmospheric organic compounds has led to . Today, is produced by opening cyclohexane using large volumes of nitric acid, a process that emits the ozone-depleting greenhouse gas . But and Arunachalam Sagadevan from the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan have discovered that ozone and UV light provide an effective alternative. 'Our process is far greener, milder and more environmentally friendly,' Hwang tells Industrial adipic acid production first oxidises cyclohexane to cyclohexanol and cyclohexanone at high temperatures and pressures. This step's yield can be less than 10%, a significant limitation. Secondly, nitric acid oxidation opens up these ring structures, completely converting them into straight...