Distillations Blog

Here lies Distillations’ Tumblr blog; long live the Distillations Blog: blog.distillations.org

[distillationslegacyblog]

There's chemistry in your taxidermy.

http://bit.ly/DeathAndTaxidermy

[distillationslegacyblog]

Our producer is pregnant. For the past nine months people have asked what her birth plan is, which to her seems like asking what kind of weather she had planned for her wedding day. “All of a sudden my life was full of these terms," she said. "Natural, medicated, doula, epidural, and it quickly became clear that there was a great debate—and I was supposed to choose a side.”  We wanted to know when this controversy started, so this month's episode is about natural childbirth: https://www.chemheritage.org/distillations/podcast/natural-childbirth

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Death and Taxidermy: Arsenic

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of stuffing animals, and learn how taxidermy never would have gotten off the ground without arsenic.

Watch the whole video here: bit.ly/DeathAndTaxidermy

[distillationslegacyblog]

"Victorian taxidermy was all about science," says one local taxidermy collector, "but it was also about spectacle."

Our new video about taxidermy explores the weird and wonderful world of taxidermy: https://www.chemheritage.org/distillations/video

[distillationslegacyblog]

This month’s best-of episode of Distillations looks at how he experiences of outsiders are actually changing the way the medical system works. 

Listen here: http://ow.ly/u4jh3043LdN

Want to hear more episodes? Subscribe on iTunes, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts: http://ow.ly/CWWG3043L0u

[othmeralia]

Our second Othmer Library Word Challenge post:

In the world of book collecting, condition is so important.  Collectors consider the book as an object and the condition of the physical form often drives the value.  Here at the Othmer Library we try to strike a balance between the condition of the book and the value of the item to researchers.  A large percentage of the items in the Othmer Library are donated so we often don’t have control over the condition of the volumes we receive. Almost all of the books we receive are worn and used in some way.  These books are often working copies owned by scientists or were once part of a research library.

This volume came to us from a recent donation from a retired chemist and you can tell.  While cataloging this volume, I saw that the book has some major condition issues, first and foremost it had an unknown stain that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what it could be!  Since the stains did not impair the text and since this title is scarce and hard to find, I decided to add it to our collection despite the condition of the pages.  

Often book damage is tragic but sometimes the damage borders on the beautiful.  Condition can turn a worn out chemistry book into an accidental work of art.  These stains look like a beautiful cobalt blue water color reminiscent of a famous Dutch post-impressionist work.

Images from Outlines from the Course of Qualitative Analysis Followed in the Giessen Laboratory by Henry Will, 1847.

[distillationslegacyblog]

Radium has disappeared from biology labs and faded from our cultural imagination, but it is difficult to overstate the extraordinary impact of this element in the early 20th century. Radium is hugely radioactive, generates large amounts of heat, and is spontaneously luminous in certain compounds—attributes that captivated scientists and the wider public when the element was first discovered. When Marie and Pierre Curie succeeded in isolating a pure sample of radium in 1902, they noted another of its more striking properties: a tendency to infect other objects around it, rendering those objects radioactive as well. This transformative power provides an apt metaphor for tracing the historical impact of radium as it moved through and altered multiple areas of science and medicine.

Read more about radium here: http://ow.ly/yt7u304heOw

[labnotes19]

Timelapse Footage of a Giant Caterpillar Weaving Its Cocoon

For six weeks, luna moth caterpillars gorge themselves on the leaves of the marula tree. Then, when they’re ready, they instinctively weave giant cocoons from Science | Smithsonian http://ift.tt/2cBRKm8 via IFTTT

[distillationslegacyblog]

Two PR guys consider the marketing of the Apollo program.

Read more.

[distillationslegacyblog]

How have philosophers, transgender patients, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have influenced health care in the United States over the past few decades? Listen to this month's episode of Distillations: http://ow.ly/qNRb3043KNz

[distillationslegacyblog]

Take a trip to Seminole Lodge, Thomas Edison’s Florida retreat.

[distillationslegacyblog]

Today’s climate-change skeptics would have us believe that the whole notion of global warming is a relatively recent, half-baked idea dreamed up by a cabal of liberal scientists bent on destroying the U.S. economy. However, the roots of scientific thinking about Earth’s temperature are buried in the 19th century.

Read more here: http://ow.ly/FU5u3044rta

[distillationslegacyblog]

Over the past year we’ve brought you stories about tacos, taxidermy, and DDT. But at the same time we’ve been thinking about and researching medicine—specifically, how outsiders to the field have helped change the ways doctors practice. Join us to find out how philosophers, transgender patients, and Jehovah’s Witnesses have influenced health care in the United States over the past few decades.

Listen to this month's episode of Distillations.

[distillationslegacyblog]

In 2013, Jovana Grbic spoke with Distillations about how she mixes science and entertainment. Her website, she writes, began with reviews of the "sci-fi juggernauts at the time—Battlestar Galactica and the big-screen readaptation of Star Trek."

By far the biggest thing I’ve learned is that big media loves science and that they really want to get it right. Conversations with screenwriters, showrunners (such as Breaking Bad’s Vincent Gilligan or The Big Bang Theory’s Bill Prady), and production advisers have made me realize that many in the entertainment industry idolize scientists and sincerely wish to portray them and their work in the best light possible. Scientists should not be intimidated by perceived walls between popular culture and science but rather should welcome opportunities for collaboration.

Read the whole story here.

[distillationslegacyblog]

Historian Elena Conis tells the story of how, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the superpowers’ domestic concerns drove unprecedented global action in the fight against disease—and how each power’s struggles to defeat other scourges, namely, smallpox and malaria, ultimately led to the recognition that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could isolate itself from the rest of the world.

Read more.

[npr]

When things heat up, they expand. And when that thing is the axle shaft to your drive train, you’re going to have to make adjustments, or else.

Michael Guarraia kneels down next to a metal part that just popped off the rear axle. “OK guys, listen up,” he tells his team. “The drive train broke again and we need to find a sustainable solution. This can’t happen during the race.”

The team members nod and furrow their brows. Some scratch their heads.

Welcome to Kinetic Sculpture Race Club at Arbutus Middle School. Guarraia is a science teacher at the suburban Maryland school, about a 20-minute drive from Baltimore.

He and two dozen students are on an eight-month mission to design and build a human-powered kinetic sculpture that they’re going to race on a 15-mile obstacle course around Baltimore Harbor.

What, exactly, is a “kinetic sculpture”?

Basically it’s a giant piece of art that contains movement within it. It can be powered by people only — no motors allowed — so the designers have to get really creative.

On A Mission To Race The Middle School Brain

GIFs: LA Johnson and Emily Bogle/NPR

[distillationslegacyblog]

In 1950 the A. C. Gilbert Company released a toy that promised to unlock the secrets of atomic power. The U-238 Atomic Energy Lab included a small amount of radioactive matter and the cloud chamber shown here, a device that allowed the viewer to watch alpha particles travel at roughly 10,000 miles per second, giving off a characteristic glow. 

Read more.