August 6 – 10 This week, Cameron channels Derek Zoolander in an epic complaint about turning left. And I know we’re all about Curiosity now, but Tom’s interview with Mars rover pilot Scott Maxwell made me get a little weepy about poor old Spirit once again. Heather wonders if archaeologists should dispense with field season. […]
Month: August 2012
Slugs have sex. You probably already knew that. And if you read my last post on banana slugs’ strange sexual appetites, you had the rare opportunity to see a slug penis. So you already know what the organ looks like. Except you don’t! That was a trick statement. You know what a banana slug’s penis looks like. […]
I shouldn’t say this. In fact, as someone who covers the field of archaeology for a living, I probably shouldn’t even be thinking this. But I find myself wondering increasingly whether it’s time for some dirt archaeologists to relinquish one of their great pleasures, namely the beloved rite of summer: field season. I say this […]
There are a lot of ways to follow the progress of the Curiosity rover as it probes the geological history of Mars. But you could do worse than following one of her drivers, Scott Maxwell, on twitter (@marsroverdriver). Sure, his tweeted celebration of Curiosity’s successful touchdown late Sunday night — “Hey, I still have a […]
I know I’m supposed to be thinking about science, but I can’t stop thinking about bikes. Last month, I was in Copenhagen, and being on a bike there seemed like more fun than it was anywhere else. Part of it was the bike—the family we exchanged houses with had a cargo trike, complete with a […]
Some of the characters of Thomas McMahon’s novel, Loving Little Egypt: Mourly Vold, a nearly-blind, off-scale intelligent young man at the School for the Blind who figures out how to take a telephone’s receiver and transmitter, make an induction coil from a pencil, adapt a Ford’s magneto, turn a hairpin into a hookswitch, and make […]
July 30 – August 3 I was wrong. It looks like you can expect a penis every Friday, thanks to the wild popularity of LWON’s Penis Fridays. This week, guest poster Erik Vance tackled dolphin penises. No, he didn’t. But he explained them to us. Ginny and Michelle reopened the case of whether it’s ever […]
The fifth in the occasional series, Thank God It’s Penis Friday. In the winter of 1996, I was inducted into the research team at Marine World Africa USA’s Marine Research Center like everybody else – with a clipboard. On it was a list of dolphin behaviors that I would spend the next three months watching. […]
