Twentieth-century scientist and modern-day Promethean Stanley Lloyd Miller was famous for his ‘spark of life’ experiments of the 1950s. In those studies he subjected a mixture of H2S, CH4, NH3 and CO2 to electrical...
Author - Nigel Chaffey
Nigel Chaffey
Leeuwenhoek whine a stinker…
I’ve long had great respect and admiration for those pioneers of microscopy. Men – for such was the case in those ‘good old days’ – such as Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew whose inquiry and...
It’s not what you know, but who you know!
Whilst humankind often debates the benefits – or otherwise – of an individual’s advancement based on patronage rather than merit, it is interesting to note that the plant world has no such scruples. Well, at least that...
Darwin reviews reviewed
Image: portrait of the 31-year-old Charles Darwin by George Richmond, 1840. If – apparently like me – you nodded off a little during 2009’s Darwin double-celebration (his birth in 1809 and publication of Origins...
Crock o’ gold in Crocosphaera?
Jack Cook, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Enzymes are essential to life as we understand it on Earth. But once they’ve participated in whatever reactions they’re involved in, what is the sense in having these...
The lingua franca of taxonomy
Image: Robert Ricker, US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Encouraging students to face their fears and take up the challenge of confronting scientific names (no longer should we call them Latin names...
Come back, Paul. All is forgiven
Image: Paul the Octopus, Wikimedia Commons. Sadly, Paul – the ‘fortune-telling octopus’ – is no more, but since his exploits during football’s World Cup last summer, we seem to have developed a taste for using biota to...
Cheers, mate!
Wikipebeer Image: Wikimedia Commons. A few years ago ‘-omics’ were all the rage in biology: metabolomics, genomics, transcriptomics, etc. And for traditional [a euphemism for old-fashioned (?)] botanists like myself it...
Why cannabis is bad for you…
Image: Wikimedia Commons, based on data from: Gable RS. 2006. In: Fish M. ed. Drugs and Society: US Public Policy. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 149–162. Many people will tell you that smoking cannabis (aka...
…and why aspirin is good for you
Image: L’Illustration, December 1923/Wikimedia Commons. Aspirin, one of the most famous plant-derived medicines, is often used as an analgesic (to relieve minor aches and pains), as an antipyretic (to reduce fever), and...
Rice
Image: Katsushika Hokusai, Watermill at Onden (1826–1833). Rice, or strictly speaking the hulls, has been proposed as a substitute for perlite – itself a substitute for soil in plant cultivation () – by Christophe...
Bark I
Image: Micael Maggs, Wikimedia Commons. As we try to draw a veil over some aspects of 2010 there are still ripples surrounding the headline-grabbing oil pollution event resulting from the explosion on the Deepwater...
Pineapple
Image: Wikimedia Commons. Cotton, a soft, fluffy staple fibre that grows in a protective capsule around seeds of plants of the genus Gossypium, is converted into the world’s most widely used natural-fibre cloth. But its...
Bark II
Nanotechnology, the study of manipulating matter on an atomic and molecular scale, and generally dealing with structures of 1–10 nm is one of the more exotic technological developments of the late 20th century. However...
