Archive for February, 2009

Thank you, ABC News for this story about a Hindu organization in India that will soon begin selling a soft drink containing cow urine. They plan to add some aloe vera and gooseberry to enhance the drinking experience and claim they don’t know what the final flavor will be yet. My guess is cow urine.

The cow is sacred in Hinduism and urine in general has been used for its supposed medicinal properties for centuries. Believers of urine therapy claim that the practice can help cure almost any ailment. Problem is, mainstream medicine has never endorsed urine therapy as a safe or effective way to treat anything. This article from slate.com points out the numerous dangers of drinking your own urine and in my own survival research I learned that the U.S. Army Field Manual has urine on the list of no-noes.

Tags: , , , ,

There’s an article in the Fashion & Style section of NYTimes.com today called “First Chores? You Bet.” It explores how the first family will stick to its routine in the White House. According to the article, Mrs. Obama laid down the law about bedtime: It’s 8 p.m. And there’ll be no sneaking extra desserts from [...]

Tags: , ,

Ah geez. After all that, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory failed to launch this morning after its scheduled 4:55 a.m. liftoff. Instead of tracking your carbon footprint from on high as we wrote about here last week, it’s probably watching fish swim by somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA official John Brunschwyler.

Tags: , , , ,

Languages are a fascinating aspect of humanity. We certainly aren’t the only species that communicates with one another using guttural noises, although our tongues help separate us from the rest of the Tree of Life through their ability to cut sounds into a vast array of polished words. We humans are, however, the only species that has managed to create written means of communication. As far as I know, we’re also the only species that has chosen to dedicate an entire field of social science to the study of language.

You asked: How do you treat chigger bites? — Doug, Helena, Al. Marshall answered: A chigger is the larva of an arachnid called the harvest mite. As adults, harvest mites eat bugs. But in the larval stage, harvest mites eat animal flesh. Despite what most people believe, chiggers do not burrow into your skin. Instead, [...]

Tags: , ,

You asked: How do spider webs not break apart when it rains or storms? — Tara, Richmond, Va. Marshall answered: Spider silk is a lot like regular silk. It is incredibly strong, and it is also stretchy. By weight, spider silk is five times stronger than steel and twice as strong as kevlar. It is [...]

Going off of yesterday’s post about the recent discovery of a possible Da Vinci painting, I wanted to delve a little further into why historians have such trouble pinning down the great Leonardo. Questions of authenticity have plagued Da Vinci scholars for a few reasons. But it also begs the question — why does it [...]

Tags: , , ,

Let’s put this as bluntly as we can: If you run across an application called Error Check System on Facebook, don’t install it. It’ll tell you that your friends can’t see your profile, when there’s really no problem at all. You could be risking your personal information, according to Stephen Musil of CNET.

Tags: , , ,

In writing a recent article about nuclear winter, I ran across this outrageous statement quite a bit: “Couldn’t we just cancel out global warming with nuclear winter?” The short answer? Yes. And you can also cure a hangnail with a meat cleaver, though it’s probably not quite the fix you’re looking for.

To be fair, no one is seriously advocating the use of thermonuclear weapons to save the environment. Most of the time, the suggestion is either a thoughtless joke or a shot at the theoretic (and therefore fallible) aspects of both global warming and nuclear winter. When it comes to understanding our atmosphere, there’s a whole lot of room to wind up getting it wrong.

Tags: , , ,

Can a human being be scared to the point of sudden death? Listen in as Chuck and Josh explore the physiological possibilities behind dying of fright in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

Tags: , , ,

Recent Postings by Category