Bryan Lowder is a bioengineer living with his family in Utah. He enjoys imagining that he has hobbies such as microcontroller programming, writing, mushroom culturing, and holography.
Article #113, written by Bryan Lowder
Bats, along with spiders and snakes, are one of the most frequently feared animals. Ask any bat lover, and they will tell you that these creatures are harmless and unfairly maligned. Sure they carry rabies, but so do many other animals, including “man’s best friend” the dog. People’s phobias, they maintain, comes from the medieval association of bats with the Devil, or from fear of the dark, or vampire legends, or some such thing. Bats are cute and good for the ecosystem. Leave them alone and they’ll leave you alone.
That last sentence may be true, but apparently some bats aren’t harmless. Certain bats are now suspected of causing some of the world’s most feared diseases. And all the trouble started because some people, rather than leave them alone, eat them.
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Reading time: About 3.5 minutes
Article #58, written by Bryan Lowder
“Thermonuclear fusion” is a big phrase with big connotations. Related phrases that immediately come to mind include “the Sun” and “H-bomb”. For those following the field, “Tokamak” and “Shiva” might pop up. What about the word “benchtop”? Throwing this in instantly brings up the 80′s “cold fusion” fiasco. But some of the frontrunners in the race to achieve controlled nuclear fusion are humble devices that could fit on your kitchen table. The newest, introduced in April of 2005, could fit in your pocket. And we’re
not talking about cold fusion.
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Reading time: About 4.1 minutes
Article #30, written by Bryan Lowder
There’s been a lot of research findings about obesity lately, but this seems to be the weirdest yet. As reported in the August 2005 ASM News (from the American Society of Microbiology) and the January 2005 International Journal of Obesity, some think that you can get fat by catching the fat flu.
Well, not flu exactly, but a human adenovirus called Ad-36. Most adenoviruses cause cold-like symptoms, but this one seems to also trigger weight gain. Richard Atkinson (president of the American Obesity Association) and others at the University of Wisconson tested obese and non-obese individuals for antibodies against Ad-36. Antibodies serve as evidence of current or past exposure to the virus.
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Reading time: About 1.6 minutes
Article #28, written by Bryan Lowder
(After all the talk about missiles and food additives, here’s something to restore your faith in Progress.)
Forget those hand-cranked radios. Forget pocketfuls of heavy D-cells. And especially forget those nifty Faraday-effect survival flashlights—you know, the ones you have to shake back and forth until you have carpal tunnel syndrome and it starts to look vaguely obscene. The ultimate human-powered camping gadget is here—the backpack generator.
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Reading time: About 3.1 minutes
Article #21, written by Bryan Lowder
Ask any astronomer if she’d like a perfectly parabolic six-meter-diameter mirror at one-fiftieth the price, and she’ll be unable to answer for all the drooling. Yet, according to the journal Science, the folks at the Alberta Canada Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) have accomplished exactly that. The secret? The mirror is 30 liters of rotating mercury.
When the heavy liquid metal is rotated, the “centrifugal” (inertial) forces combine with gravity to form the liquid into a near-mathematically-perfect paraboliod. This shape is ideal for collecting the faint light from astronomical objects and focusing it into an image. The larger the mirror, the more light gathered, and the clearer pictures you get (within certain constraints).
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Reading time: About 2.5 minutes
