Swans on Tea

OK, not really, but it’s a top-10 list:
Top 10 Amazing Chemical Reactions
The neatest stuff from chemistry without actually blowing anything up. (One reaction is labeled an explosion, but nothing goes “boom,” and technically the Meissner Effect isn’t chemistry, but I’m willing to give that a pass because it’s cool.)
via Skulls in the Stars

NY Times book review
Johnson’s list is eclectic and his outlook romantic. “Science in the 21st century has become industrialized,” he states, with experiments “carried out by research teams that have grown to the size of corporations.” By contrast, Johnson (a longtime contributor to The New York Times) favors artisans of the laboratory, chronicling “those rare [...]

Not the first, not the last, just the latest local one to do it. Klaynos weighs in on What is science?

This reminds me — I need some new batteries. A few of mine just died from overcharging.
Adventures in Rechargeable Batteries
For one thing, there’s the issue of discharge rate. It turns out that massive 2500mAh capacity of the Energizer rechargeable battery doesn’t mean much when the battery drains itself within a month.
[...]
So putting a larger [...]

The World’s Worst Toaster
Fortunately it doesn’t belong to me. But the web experience described does — I buy stuff for the lab. I run across the “bad toaster” interfaces all the time. For the life of me, I don’t get why certain segments of the science/tech world won’t tell you how much [...]

New Sarcasm Meds (from the makers of Damitol)
The speed of sarcasm: Mock 1

You Say Organic Potato, I Say Poisonous Lump of Neurotoxins
I was thinking of weaponized potatoes, and was going to entitle this “Potato in the Hole!” but that quickly brought up a decidedly uncomfortable mental image.
But it’s not just potatoes that can kill you with their toxins. Apple seeds contain cyanogenic glycosides, which can [...]

You say MRI, I say NMR. These sound almost like William Steig would have used them, but not quite.
Chad over at Uncertain Principles give the lowdown on the phenomenon of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
[...] Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR), which is the “M” and the “R” in “Magnetic Resonance Imaging”– they ditched the “N” because “nuclear” [...]

It’s also pepsi-through-the-nose funny, especially if you are a reasonably strict grammarian.
Read about the f’amazing Dr. Novoselov

US currency is ugly, and the new $5 bill, which entered circulation a few weeks ago, especially so. A purple “5″ on a green bill? Fugly. The fun thing about visiting other countries is seeing currency and coinage that looks interesting. I never realized how bland US currency was until I [...]

Stonehenge and Stonehenge Replicas

Lest you think that physics research is all about smashing shiny new large hadrons into each other (or even used economy or subcompact hadrons), or something to do with conductors (whether they be super, normal or semi), or the groupies — let’s not forget the groupies — there are folks out there studying the physics [...]