I discuss the myths about why our fingers go “pruney” in the bath or swimming pool in my book Deceived Wisdom, the truth seems to lie in the work of Mark Changizi. In this cartoon, we see the explanation and get to hear his theory in his own words.Deceived...

The tabloids were screaming at new parents this week desperately yelling at them not to share a bed with their newborn because it could be lethal, causing sudden infant death syndrome, or cot death. The research said so. SIDS is tragic, of course, but a little...

As the average age of the population goes up with people surviving many years more than their allegorical three score years and ten, the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of senile dementia will rise too. Many people can suffer symptoms...

Periodic Table of QR codes – QR codes are those little black and white boxes that look like a messed up barcode, which is essentially what they are, 2D barcodes. They’re becoming almost ubiquitous. Every event you attend, every restaurant you pass,...

Penrose, Escher, back – M.C. Escher‘s famously paradoxical illustration of 1960 depicting a stairway atop an “impossible” building, and made famous recently in a dreamscape of the Hollywood movie “Inception“, that seems to...

Scerri stuff indeed – Non-chemists, and perhaps a few chemists, might have assumed that once all the holes in Mendeleev's Periodic Table were filled with modern discoveries and the lanthanides and actinides added, that the Table was forever immutable,...

My recent Research Highlight on ChemistryViews.org about the nature of the Periodic Table of the Elements attracted a lot of readers and has stimulated an ongoing debate among those arguing as to whether or not there is a definitive format for this iconic tool....

Emilie Bigorgne of the Universit Paul Verlaine – Metz and colleagues suggest that the increasing production of nanomaterials will in turn increase the release of nanosized by-products to the environment. Whether or not these particles will accumulate...

David Bradley recently blogged about a molecule that resembles the Penrose Steps, the post caught the eye of Dan Lednicer who reveals here a tale of aromatic chemistry from the pioneering days of 1950s organic synthesis and alludes to the impossibility of a...