Category: Science
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Did Scythian men feminize themselves by drinking mare’s urine?
Andrew WilliamsLeicester, United Kingdom The Enarees were nomadic Scythian soothsayers who lived within the areas bounded by the rivers Danube, Bug, Don, and Dnieper, and who Herodotus in the 5th century AD asserted were effeminate.1,2 Unfortunately the Scythians did not leave any written records. Hippocrates’ Airs Water and Places XX11 using the term Anarieis related…
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Max Planck on innovation and age
Howard Fischer Uppsala, Sweden Gravedigger. 1940. Library of Congress. Max Planck (1858–1947) was born in Kiel, Germany, to an educated family. He earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1879 from the University of Munich. His quantum theory, in which he postulated that energy is released in discrete units and not continuously, won the Nobel…
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Will DNA be the next invisible ink?
Edward TaborBethesda, Maryland, United States Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical that forms our genes, can be used to encode and transmit narrative documents and photos, as shown in several published studies. DNA might also become the next “invisible ink” because messages in DNA can be “hidden in plain sight” to reduce the chance of being…
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Fred Gey, father of the antioxidant hypothesis
Alun EvansBelfast, United Kingdom Fred Gey was a German scientist who developed the concept that antioxidant vitamin deficiency caused certain diseases. He qualified as an MD at the University of Basel in 1952, having first researched clinical biochemistry. He then spent two years in the biochemistry section of the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen, Germany,…
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Chemical origins of terrestrial biology
David GreenChicago, Illinois, United States As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1950s, I attended a lecture by Harold C. Urey, a Nobel laureate. The subject of his lecture was the origin of life, and he described an experiment that he and his graduate student, Stanley Miller, had performed at the University…
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Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and X-rays
Arpan K. Banerjee Solihull, England Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. LIFE Photo Archive. Via Wikimedia. The name Röntgen will be familiar to most for his discovery of X-rays on November 8, 1895. This date is now celebrated as the International Day of Radiology. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was born in Lennep, Germany on March 27, 1845. The…
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The myth of knowledge
Chloe Lee Singapore Argonauts in quest of the Golden Fleece. Maxfield Parrish, 1910. New York Public Library Digital Collections. Legend has it that aeons ago on the Island of Colchis hung a magical Golden Fleece that could heal any disease. Modern medicine has proposed a new explanation for this incredible tale: Colchicum autumnale, a…
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Robert Hooke and Micrographia
JMS Pearce Hull, England Fig 1. Cells in cork tree bark. From Hooke’s Micrographia via the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is perhaps rash to attempt to appraise the work of Robert Hooke (1635–1703), but renewed attention is merited to a great scientist whose contribution to medicine and science has not been adequately acknowledged. Robert Hooke…