The manned craft negotiates entry into the thin Martian atmosphere and lands in some sort of ingenious fashion in the three-eighths gravity. This is it. My generation’s very own “One small step for a human” moment. Real live people are inside, ready to hop out and get to work. The fifteen-minutes-delayed camera feed zooms in […]
May 26-30, 2014 I have been in the back of a London taxicab in the small hours with Sally, and after what seemed like days of nausea-inducing back-alley turns I loudly suggested we might be faster just taking a main road. This was met with scorn and derision from said co-blogger. Now I know why. When […]
April 28 – May 2, 2014 This week the people of LWON congregated loosely and coincidentally around the theme of truth. A guest post by Jennifer S. Holland finds a myriad of health benefits to yoga, but evidence for its power to trigger emotional release eludes her search. Michelle introduces an excellent Bullshit Prevention Protocol, […]
Last week when NASA Administrator Charles Bolden addressed the sparsely-attended Humans to Mars Summit in DC, he moved the institutional goalpost past space exploration and toward space settlement.
In playwright David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work Proof (later adapted into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal) there’s an exchange between a young mathematician and the daughter of his recently-deceased mentor. They’re at a party and discussing the use of amphetamines by older mathematicians: Hal: There’s this fear that your creativity peaks around […]
Engineers and architects have been facing the question for years. “When we were designing the Tate Modern, there was a moment when someone said, ‘What will you do when the water is a metre or two higher?’” remembers Stuart Smith, a director at global engineering firm Arup. “As an individual building, there’s not much you […]
“Did I ever tell you about the time I got charged by a moose?” We were at the point in our camping trip where everyone was dusting off their close-encounters-with-wildlife stories. “Now, Davis, don’t tell that story or we’re going to get into an argument,” warned his wife. “She was downwind of the bear spray […]
In the late 1960s, when North America was first wising up to pollution, a group of progressive farmers resolved to do their part. Phosphate levels in nearby lakes were promoting blue-green algal blooms, excessively nourishing the cyanobacteria. The blooms consumed oxygen in the lakes, and massive fish kills followed. While it was easy to […]