The most recent report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn’t pull any punches. The globe continues to warm, ice continues to melt at an alarming pace, and the seas continue to rise. Climate change isn’t some distant dilemma. It’s already happening. The science is solid, and the problem is urgent. “Nobody on this planet is […]
Month: May 2014
The moment of my son’s birth is seared into my brain, but fogginess reigns in the aftermath. Our hospital stay is a series of blurry memories: broken sleep, a jaundiced and hungry newborn, and me crying while scarfing down a few forkfuls of food in my spare moments alone. Once home, I didn’t immediately feel […]
The jokers in the house are starting to learn the game of kings. The set they play with is piecemeal, with a wooden toy horse for a white knight and a lump of rainbow-colored glass for one of the pawns. The board is metal, designed for playing checkers on the road. But still the jokers learn. Until now, […]
May 12-16, 2014 This week’s stories covered nostalgia, the physics of scrubbing, the physics of space, the physics of candied orange peels, and earthquakes. It has been three decades since Richard left Chicago. So why is he still dreaming of Wrigley Field? “I suppose it has something to do with the 1969 season.” Guest Poster […]
Last Saturday morning at 2:36 AM, Central Time, I woke up to the sound of my house creaking. For a split second I thought I might still be tipsy from the long night out in the La Condesa neighborhood of Mexico City, where I live. But that wasn’t it. “Earthquake!” I yelled and hit the […]
*NOW WITH UPDATE: See below The neighbors came over, maybe a year ago now, and one of them, a Hungarian physicist, brought along candied orange peel he’d made from his grandmother’s recipe. The physicist is the nicest human on earth, but his grandmother is the one I love; I’d love anyone who thought up those […]
On Saturday I went to the visitor’s center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, showed my driver’s license, and got a yellow paper badge to hang around my neck. The occasion: the friends and family day for MMS, the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission. MMS isn’t one of NASA’s better-known missions. When I googled […]
On a recent quiet Sunday morning, I resolved to clean the caked-on grime on my stove. A roiling pot of pasta had overflowed one night, and in the rush to get plate to table and food to four-year-old’s mouth, the cloudy starchy water had cured onto the enamel around the burner and now refused to budge. […]
