Physicists, like the ancient Greeks, like to gossip about their gods. A few days ago, three physicists* were talking on Twitter** about a review by a fourth physicist, Freeman Dyson, of a biography of one of these gods, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and about his war with another one, John Archibald Wheeler. Physicist #1: Oppenheimer did […]
Month: August 2013
I get a lot of ridiculous press releases, but the headline that made its way to my inbox today, “New Cancer-Fighting Game App Goes Global,” represented a new level of nonsense. The press release described a “ground-breaking” smartphone “cancer-fighting game app” that promised to “help young cancer patients fight their disease.” If you’re like me, […]
One morning last month a friend and I took a train from London to the city of Gloucester, in southwestern England. The next morning after breakfast we started walking on the Cotswold Way, one of the UK’s National Trails. On its way to Bath, 60-some miles away, the trail passes through quiet beech forests, open […]
August 12- 16 Snark week! In which we tell you what happens when cute animals get ugly. Christie introduced us to the creature that goes Cock-a-doodle DIE. Roberta told chilling tales of the gribble: chubby, adorable scourge of the sea. Cameron explained whys we should fear the bunny. Michelle warned us about petting the pretty […]
In the Southern summer of 2004, my then-girlfriend and I were camped in a shelter near a rock climbing area in New Zealand called Flock Hill. It was a gorgeous landscape, sweeping grassy hills made famous as Rohan in the “Lord of the Rings” and glacial erratics from the final battle scene in “The Lion, […]
It’s small, it’s fuzzy, and it hurts like hell. Variously known as the “cow killer,” “mule killer,” and “motherf-ing thing that just stung me,” the velvet ant packs more pain per pound than the meanest great white. Don Manley, a professor emeritus of entomology at Clemson University, recalls his run-in with Dasymutilla sp. as the worst […]
Their fur is so soft. Their paws are velvet. And the twitch of their little noses can send people into paroxysms of baby talk. But behind that cute little “bunny” is a fearsome rabbit, ready to destroy everything in its path. Yes, the true nature of the rabbit is starting to come to light.
What is the most fearsome animal in the ocean? Is it the great white shark? The deadly stingray? The Megalodon? No. It is the Gribble. A gribble is an adorably chubby wee crustacean about three to six millimeters long. It has seven pairs of legs and four pairs of appendages sprouting around its mouth. And […]
