9 weird ingredients in your food
In late April 2017 the FDA announced a recall of frozen hash browns that may have been contaminated with “extraneous golf ball materials.” Mere days before that, a dead bat was found in a...
Monthly Archive: May 2017
History’s deadliest colors
When radium was first discovered, its luminous green color inspired people to add it into beauty products and jewelry. It wasn’t until much later that we realized that radium’s harmful effects outweighed its visual...
How marbles are made
The history of marbles No one really knows when the game of marbles first began, or when the first marble was made. It is probably fair to say that in one form or another...
Why does ice melt? Why does cream spread in coffee?
There’s a concept that’s crucial to chemistry and physics. It helps explain why physical processes go one way and not the other: why ice melts, why cream spreads in coffee, why air leaks out...
Laura Buxton
Fifteen years ago, the Swindon Advertiser reported on a seemingly remarkable chain of events full of coincidence which had taken place in June 2001. That month, a girl named Laura Buxton was attending her...
How does asthma work?
More than 300 million people around the world suffer from asthma, and around 250,000 people die from it each year. But why do people get asthma, and how can this disease be deadly? Christopher...
First evidence of the multiverse?
A curious chilly area of space may have been created when a parallel universe crashed into our own, scientists have suggested, the first evidence that we may be part of a multiverse. In 2015, astrophysicists...
Implant extrusion
This 5 year-old girl was referred because of partial extrusion of the left orbital implant. She lost her sight from bilateral congenital primary open angle glaucoma. The left eye was eviscerated 3 years ago...
Horse shoeing
Most horses need shoeing, which protects the walls of their hooves and their toes. Depending on the work the horse does, the shoes can protect the muscles, bones and tendons of the legs from...