The Wake

Illustration by Sarah Morean

Artificial sweeteners have been a boon to the diet foods industry, allowing companies to market foods to a weight obsessed populace with an insatiable sweet tooth. In the U.S. artificial sweeteners are a $1.5 billion market. “Diet Dr. Pepper tastes more like regular Dr. Pepper,” the TV tells us. “Zero calories!” the bottle of Coke Zero …

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Illustration by Dixon Bordiano

When you drink a big glass of water from the tap, you probably don’t assume that it’s 100 percent pure H2O; you know there is fluoride in there for healthy teeth and other various chemicals used to kill bacteria and improve taste. What you don’t know is that you are probably also drinking a big, cold …

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Photo by Ben Lansky

Nalgene water bottles are a fun, fashionable way to carry water and other potables, keeping students happy and hydrated. In the past few years, Nalgenes have become so popular that it is impossible to walk fifty feet across campus without seeing a plethora of shatter resistant plastic water bottles. Now, after this widespread distribution we are …

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Society perceives scientists and artists as mutually exclusive, polar opposites. Artists are right brained, left leaning,free spirits while scientists are logical, analytical, left brainers.. Conventional wisdom says that scientists do not make art and artists do not do science. In However, one only has to look at Bohr’s model of the atom, inspired by Cubism, or the highly controversial Body Worlds exhibit to realize that art and science have more in common than meets the …

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Illustration by Sarah Morean

During the polar bear’s approximate 200 thousand years on Earth, they have been called many things — from vicious killer to fuzzy, adorable, Coke-guzzling marketing technique. The Inuit call polar bears Nanook, meaning master of all bears, and considered them wise, powerful, and close to human. Early Arctic explorers viewed polar bears as fearless marauders, killing …

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Illustration by Sarah Morean

Walking into the dental hygiene aisle at Target has become an overwhelming experience. In the U.S., the dental products market is a $7.5 billion a year business and row after row of toothbrushes, all claiming to remove more plaque than the rest, make this extremely clear. Toothbrushes have become so technologified that they not only vibrate …

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Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Too many syllables? Just call it MRSA. Discovered in 1880 by a Scottish surgeon, Staph infections are common in hospitals. With the increase in the use of antibiotics, a resistant strain of Staph (MRSA) emerged in the 1960s. In recent years, medical officials have been faced with a troubling increase in the occurrence of Staph in healthy individuals who have not been recently hospitalized. Although community-associated strains of MRSA are treatable, they …

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A few years ago, actress Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter Apple. If only the naming of actual apples was so simple.“Naming an apple is worse than naming a kid,” Dr. James Luby says, professor of plant genetics and director of the fruit breeding program at the Horticultural Research Center, a division of the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. “It’s okay if there are two or three Emilys in the class, but no two apples in …

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