“It’s not your usual rock that you would find,” says Jonathan O’Neil, a geologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. It’s a bit of an understatement because O’Neil is referring to what he believes is the world’s oldest rock, a funny-looking basalt embedded in the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt in northern Quebec. The rock itself […]
Month: December 2011
There’s only one thing more exciting than science, and that’s a science quiz! We’ll announce the winners in this year’s LWON Science Quiz in just a moment — remember, it was one prize for the best additional question submitted, and one for a random drawing from all the 100% correct answers. But first, a big […]
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was, in a way, a foregone conclusion. The 1998 discovery by two teams of scientists that the expansion of the universe is accelerating—under the influence of something that scientists have shruggingly come to call dark energy, which later studies have revealed to comprise 72.8 percent of the universe—was one […]
There is an old story about a scorpion and a turtle. Variants abound, but the basic tale revolves around an unusually talkative scorpion that asks a turtle for a lift across a river. The turtle refuses at first, fearing the scorpion’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. The scorpion insists, the turtle relents, and the two get […]
In the rural Rocky Mountains where I live, we disagree about a lot of things — politics, religion, water, Tim Tebow — but we all agree on aspen. We love them, especially when they turn blaze-yellow in the fall, and we’d like them to stick around. So in 2004, when aspen throughout the Rockies started […]
2011 is drawing to a close, and what a big year it was…for science! Many interesting and important scientific things occurred, and we hope you were paying attention, because here’s your chance to test your knowledge of the most notable scientific developments of 2011 with our super-scientific end-of-the-year quiz! Did you know you can win […]
In October, 2006, I wrote a story that began like this . . . “In a hangar-sized building at the University of Maryland, Dan Lathrop is playing God. He and his students are cobbling together a three-meter titanium ‘earth’ that—when spun—they hope will give birth to a magnetic field similar to that generated by the […]
As I write this, 15,000 delegates from around the globe have congregated in Durban, South Africa to take part in a magisterial game of pretend. Officially called the 17th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, this recurring charade provides an opportunity for scientists […]
