Dear Reader: the above is a sketch of an Individual Mobility System (IMS) proposed by a very special agency in the Department of Defense. The sketch was unearthed by my friend and much-admired colleague, Sharon Weinberger, who generously shared it on Twitter. You could call this an IMS. Or you could call it a jet […]
Month: March 2017
March 6-10, 2017 This week at LWON: If it feels to you as if the world is losing its collective mind, perhaps some a history lesson can clarify the current political climate – specifically, the history of the Renaissance. We may be living through another version of it, says my friend Chris. What people are […]
In the summer of 2011, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History was in the process of doing some bug relocation. Specifically, they were moving some of their beetles from the museum building downtown out to a storage facility in the suburbs—specifically, the non-plant-eating scarabs. It was a lot of scarabs. The museum has a […]
Having a child changes a man. Perhaps not as much as it changes a woman but a fair bit. A friend of mine recently had his first kid and decided to take up hunting. He’s a successful nurse in a big-time hospital but somewhere deep inside him, he wanted to know he could provide meat […]
You’ve noticed the cold starting to leave. The light has been strengthening, sun lifting every day, and the wind has lost some of its bitterness. Twenty-three and a half degrees of tilt to the planet, you can feel every degree. Two mornings ago a blizzard hit where I live in Colorado. It was a fierce […]
Let’s talk about de-extinction. Actually, let’s not. Let’s talk about what the as-yet-unrealized technology known as “de-extinction” really is, which is the creation of hybrid organisms using genetic material from both extinct and extant species. Last month, a team of scientists announced that a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo—”more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits,” […]
Very few of my friends—I, least of all—correctly predicted Donald Trump’s victory in the polls. The handful who gave him a good chance of winning did so in the wake of Brexit, with a view to the parallel factors both elections shared. The exception in my life is my friend Chris Kutarna. Here he is […]
February 27 – March 3, 2017 In uncertain times, Michelle turns to crime novels, the one certain world in which reasoning is logical, evidence is crucial, mysteries are solved, and the good guys win. Jennifer calls her Aunt Judy (famed commenter on LWON), asks how she’s doing. “Terrible,” she says. So Jennifer calls her dad, […]
