by Cheryl Rofer
Finally, a positive contribution. Sir Mark Sykes, the British diplomat who helped draw boundary lines after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919, may be about to contribute to our understanding of influenza. Sykes died in the great influenza pandemic, and his body has been exhumed by scientists at the London School of Medicine and Dentistry. The scientists hope to sequence the DNA of influenza virus still in Sykes’s body to obtain clues as to why that particular strain of influenza was so deadly.
Triboluminescence – and worse! You may be aware that wintergreen Life Savers give off light when you crunch them and that sticky tape does the same when you pull it off the roll. Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, have now found that tape gives off x-rays as well. They have taken x-rays of their fingers using tape as the x-ray source. Yet one more thing for purists to worry about.