The Chesapeake Bay was born as the Susquehanna River. Around 35 million years ago, an asteroid apparently smacked into what is now eastern Virginia and left a 50-mile-wide crater, a sink into which all the rivers – mainly the Susquehanna but also the Potomac and lesser rivers — coming east out of the Appalachians naturally […]
Month: March 2011
Three weeks ago, a BBC journalist experienced first hand the random brutality of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s security forces. Chris Cobb-Smith and two colleagues were heading to the town of Zawiya to cover the conflict, when security forces arrested them at a checkpoint and hustled them off to a makeshift prison. There guards repeatedly beat […]
Last week, my neighborhood health food store ran out of potassium iodide, a compound that can prevent thyroid cancer in people exposed to high doses of radiation. When I called the store, an employee told me demand has been high “ever since the incident in Japan.” I live in Brooklyn, New York, nearly 7,000 miles […]
On 24 September, 1987, six year old Leide Ferreira threw up ten minutes after eating her egg sandwich. The next day her parents started throwing up too. Vomiting and diarrhea were followed by strange aches and burns. When Leide’s mother Maria went to the public health clinic in Goiás, the doctor ascribed her symptoms to […]
Please allow me to introduce a new person of LWON . . . Sally Adee, a technology features editor at New Scientist and an all around top-notch human being. I first met Sally in 2006, when we were both starry eyed graduate students at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Back then she was obsessed with […]
As someone who writes about archaeology, I often consider myself to be in the death business. I’ve grown accustomed to the company of skeletons and mummies, wrapped in their linen bandages, curled fetally under ancient house floors, or splayed in a tangle of bodies in a mass grave. Now, like a mortician, I take a […]
The late-night radio airwaves—the insomniac’s solace, the new father’s companion—have been heavy with war, disaster and calamity for weeks now. How very different are the sounds of bombing runs over Tripoli from the small coughs and cries through the baby monitor, with which they commingle. The most extraordinary news of the past two weeks, however, […]
I’m beginning to think that my LWON byline should read: Virginia Hughes, the one who writes about obscure applications of DNA testing. First there was the story about the scientist who found a rare DNA blip that could prove that the corpse in Napoleon’s tomb really is Napoleon. Then there was the team that screened […]
