by Tom Mason
YOUR MOTHER IS RELATED TO a venereal disease. It isn’t just an edgy insult. It’s the truth.
Not that there’s much of a family resemblance, but the tiny organisms swimming around in Dr. Andrew Roger’s microscope known as Trichomonas vaginalis are our distant relatives nevertheless. Very distant. These tiny one-celled organisms and the creatures [...]
by Tom Mason
LUTETIUM TANTALITE – IT’S A mouthful for sure, but it’s also a particularly useful compound. The fact that lutetium tantalite is the most dense stable white material known to exist makes it ideal as a phosphor substance – the material that glows on the hands of an alarm clock or a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee. [...]
by Tom Mason
IN THE CURIOUSLY POETIC TERMINOLOGY of the Japanese military they were called kaiten – “heaven shakers.” In reality, they were manned suicide torpedoes, ridden like horses by young men who sucked their final breaths from a snorkel attached to a bottle of air. Because they lurked silently under the waves, the kaiten were [...]
THE GALA TORONTO CONCERT DEBUT of 13-year-old piano virtuoso Lucas Porter was a heady occasion to be sure, but the young Port Williams, Nova Scotia native was hardly in foreign territory. He wasn’t even in Toronto — not physically, at least. When he sat down at the keyboard to play the first notes in his [...]
IT”S ONE OF THOSE APOCRYPHAL stories that has become part of the folklore of Toronto. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright – the genius behind Fallingwater and the Prairie School movement – hated Toronto City Hall when he saw the blueprints a few months before his death in 1959. Most Torontonians loved it. With two office [...]
Photocages have big potential in the world of pharmaceuticals
by Tom Mason
What is you could turn a chemical reaction off simply by flicking a lightswitch? That’s exactly what chemists are doing with a technology called photocages.
In chemical parlance, photocages are molecules that can be attached to another molecule and then removed again by irradiating them with light. [...]
