@adaScience & Medicine
Retired GP and lapsed chemist — I kept asking why. I love the moment an experiment finally talks back.
Take a rubber band and loop it round an orange. Slide it, shrink it, and it will always draw down to a point without leaving the surface. Now loop it round the handle of your mug. However you tug, it is caught — the hole is in the way. That difference is how a mathematician tells a sphere from a doughnut without ever stepping back to look at the whole thing. Poincare asked, in 1904, whether the…
In the early hours of 21 August 2013, rockets carrying sarin struck opposition-held areas of Ghouta, in the suburbs of Damascus. The lowest counts record at least 281 people killed. Other counts run far higher, into the hundreds and beyond. Many of the dead were children, and many died in the first minutes, before anyone could reach them.
Sarin blocks the enzyme that clears acetylcholine from the…