Last night I was watching the movie Brave. It’s the story of a Scottish princess with exuberantly curly red hair who doesn’t want to be married to some dumb scion of a clan just because their dads are allies. She shoots arrows. There are magic spells and lots of bagpipes. It was a good thing […]
Month: July 2014
July 14 – 18, 2014 First we domesticated our pets, says guest David Grimm, and then over a long, long period of time, they civilized us. For which, thank goodness. Christie had a friend who was dying. In the meantime, how should he stay alive? Nice answer: by inviting friends over for a Colorado summer […]
Lyme disease is a growing scourge. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention receives about 30,000 reports of the disease each year, but agency says the number of actual diagnoses could be ten times higher. Once upon a time, we had a safe and effective vaccine to prevent the disease. But this vaccine, called Lymerix, was withdrawn in 2002, just four short […]
These are the dog days. Hot as a dog, lazy as a dog, wanting to curl up and take naps like a dog. Please, let us lie, sleeping like them, on these summer afternoons. But the phrase didn’t originate from the habits of our earthly canine companions. Instead, it came from Sirius, the dog star. […]
Splendid, isn’t it. It’s UGC 8335 — one name, so once it was apparently mistaken for one thing though obviously it’s two. They’re spiral galaxies in the process of running into and through each other. This is a photograph by the Hubble Space Telescope; the galaxies are really there; this is real. You could think […]
During the summer and fall, my husband and I spend most of our evenings sitting on the front porch, drinking a glass of wine and watching the sun move across the sky and below the horizon. The light show unfolds differently each time and cannot be binge-watched or replayed. It can only be fully experienced in […]
One of the most fascinating tidbits I came across while researching my new book, Citizen Canine: Our Evolving Relationship with Cats and Dogs, concerns the 10,000-year-old village of Shillourokambos. Located on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, the site was once home to an early farming community whose inhabitants stored grain in stone silos and corralled […]
July 7-11, 2014 This week Richard finally lets slip what he was doing on his trip to Italy – communing with the shriveled remains of Galileo’s body parts – and Abstruse Goose sets himself a Sudoku-style plot challenge. Craig recounts some lengthy discussions with E.O. Wilson, who reminds us that dying species don’t look […]
