By Richard Brill When cave dwellers hunkered around the fire pit, fire was a source of heat as well as light and there was nothing to read so the low luminous efficiency did not matter.
By Richard Brill Touch screens are everywhere: smartphones, laptop screens, supermarket checkouts, restaurant tills, ATMs, airport check-in kiosks, museum information-booths and GPS devices, to name a few.
By Richard Brill It was exactly 10 years ago, April 14, 2003, that the human genome project reported the first complete sequence of human DNA. Now the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments over whether certain human gene sequences can be patented, a ruling that could affect how science and law intersect for years, if not decades.
By Richard Brill Folk wisdom has recognized the role of empty calories in weight gain and obesity for years, but there has not been much public discussion about the addictive qualities of sugar.
By Richard Brill For six millennia we humans have deliberately manipulated genes; modern corn is as distantly related to its wild ancestor as a Chihuahua is to a wolf. In 1944, American biologist Norman Borlaug began 30 years in Mexico developing new strains of wheat.
By Richard Brill Rainbows are both beautiful and rare, but we see more than our fair share of them in Hawaii because our mountains and tradewinds combine to produce rain on the slopes of the mountains.
By Richard Brill Stars have an average lifetime of 5 billion years, so we obviously cannot study one from birth to death.
By Richard Brill How long are your telomeres? A telomere shortening mechanism limits cells to a fixed number of divisions, and animal studies suggest that this is responsible for aging on the cellular level. In other words, it may be the mechanism that sets a limit on life spans.
By Richard Brill Don't wait until tomorrow to read this column. If the Mayan calendar is correct, the world will end at 1:11 p.m. today, Hawaii time.
By Richard Brill Fluorescent lights have been the primary source of industrial lighting indoors since the 1930s, but recent advances have put compact fluorescent lights in the spotlight for home use.
By Richard Brill There are many different opinions about what is meant by "sustainable fishery."
By Richard Brill Hawaii consumes more seafood per capita than any other state — about 11.5 percent, nearly twice as much as the U.S. average. This is not surprising considering that Hawaii is the only island state.
By Richard Brill A unique spacecraft has been in orbit for the past year around Vesta, a small rock about 330 miles in diameter and the second-largest asteroid in the asteroid belt.
By Richard Brill Fructose is commonly known as fruit sugar. It makes fruits sweet, but it is also a component of ordinary table sugar as well as honey.
By Richard Brill Cobalt-60 is a common source of medical and industrial radiation. In medicine its primary use is in cancer radiotherapy. In industry it is used to test welds and casings and a variety of measuring instruments.
By Richard Brill The Hawaii-based shallow-set pelagic longline fishery primarily targets swordfish in high seas of the North Pacific.
By Richard Brill Which came first, the chicken or the egg? This is a very old question, and it seems at first to have no definitive answer. Many problems like this one are confusing because we look at them the wrong way or ask the wrong questions.
By Richard Brill Nuclear radiation bombards us every day of our lives. Some comes from natural sources and some comes from human activity. Natural sources include cosmic radiation from space, unstable atomic nuclei produced by interactions of cosmic radiation with atoms in the atmosphere and radioactive decay of natural nuclides in Earth's crust.
By Richard Brill Although detailed climate records exist for only 150 years or so, several Earth sensors keep records that allow us to infer past climate information. These proxy climate data sources substitute for actual weather instruments.
By Richard Brill Before the development of magnetic resonance imaging, X-rays were the only way to image inside the body. X-rays are too energetic and show hard structures such as bones while they penetrate connective tissue and organs that show only as ghostly images.
By Richard Brill A beach seems constant from day to day, yet it is an ever-changing river of sand. On a geologic time scale the life of a beach is like a fruit fly in our human time scale.
By Richard Brill Normally we think of an ecosystem in reference to the environment in which we humans live. From the perspective of a microscopic organism living inside us, however, the human body is the ecosystem and indeed the whole universe.
By Richard Brill Everybody knows what "greasy" means, even if only from that coating on your hands after downing a bucket of the Colonel's finest. But rendered animal fat is a different kind of grease from that used for lubrication.
By Richard Brill Listening to commercials, one would think that chemicals are harmful and should be avoided. Ads for carpet cleaning, household products, toiletries, pet foods and other products claim to be chemical free.
By Richard Brill Coral reefs are among the most complex ecosystems on the planet. Often called "rain forests of the sea," coral reefs occupy less than 0.1 percent of the world ocean surface. Their low abundance belies their great importance.
By Richard Brill Behold the ubiquitous gecko climbing a vertical wall in the blink of an eye or scurrying across the ceiling in gravity-defying dashes. For at least 2,000 years people have wondered what made geckos' feet stick, because the footpads do not feel sticky to the touch.
By Richard Brill Research has debunked the notion that we use only 10 percent of our brain, firmly filing it in the urban myth category.
By Richard Brill Ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) as a means for generating electricity has been around for a long time. French physicist Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval proposed it in 1881. One of his students, Georges Claude, built a 22-kilowatt experimental system at Matanzas Bay, Cuba, in 1930.
By Richard Brill In an atmosphere that is 99 percent nitrogen and oxygen, it is easy to forget about the minor constituents that comprise the air we breathe.
By Richard Brill The rare earths are a relatively abundant group of 17 elements that are so chemically similar that 15 of them occupy a single row and column in the periodic table. They occur as oxides, or 'earths' in the old chemical jargon, and they are not really so rare.
By Richard Brill Cryogenics is the study of the very cold, how to produce extremely low temperatures and the behavior of materials at those temperatures.
By Richard Brill Data suggest that it may be dangerous to hold a cellphone while driving, but does using a cellphone cause cancer?
By Richard Brill Beginning with selection of the first astronauts in 1959 before human spaceflight operations began, NASA asked the military services to provide a list of personnel who met specific qualifications.
By Richard Brill Three-D printers create three-dimensional objects by laying down layer after layer of the printing medium only a few thousandths of an inch at a time.