A charming website called Who’s the Scientist? shows seventh graders’ images of scientists before and after actually meeting scientists.
Month: June 2010
When I was a child, my grandfather took me to London’s Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons. Thousands of these statue-splotchers covered the square, feeding on seeds offered by the outstretched hands of excited tourists. It must have been a favorite outing, because he also took my mother and her cousin (left) out for a […]
June’s solstice has just passed and I find myself where I usually am each year at this time—37,000 feet in the air and winging off to the field. One of the great joys of my job is to set out armed to the teeth with notebooks, cameras and voice recorder, and join an archaeological crew in […]
Crop circles have moved well past circles. Now they’re jellyfish, dragonflies, and trilobites, drawn using higher math, computers, laser pointers, and GPS’s. A lovely little essay by a physicist in a recent Nature calls them “modern mathematical artworks” and hopes that this summer will produce a “bumper batch.” They seem to have no larger meaning, […]
Pay attention to the quote below the drawing. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist whose specialities were nuclear physics, gravitation — he created the term, “black hole” — and getting people riled up. He died in 2008 at age 96. I mean, when Victor Hugo writes that science says the last word on nothing, […]
The word, “data” – tables of numbers, incomprehensible graphs — for most of us would make a good sleep aid. For astronomers, though, “data” means a star-sized thing that outshines a galaxy, or a galaxy just being born, or a star that spins in milliseconds. Data for astronomers is a way to survive, a reason […]
Seldom has something so tiny and so unprepossessing exacted such an immense toll of human misery. Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoa that causes the most serious form of malaria, looks like a little red comma or pear-shaped stain on the surface of a red blood cell. Yet make no mistake, this tiny protozoa is a deft […]
The elegant Eirene Gown, named for the Greek goddess of peace, is sewn from silk hand-gathered from naturally-hatched wild silkworms and woven on antique looms in a small mill in India. Its delicate coral hue is derived from a dye extracted from the root of the Madder plant, growing in a war zone in the […]
