A drop of treasure, lost in an ocean of debt

Let’s get this out of the way first: Ancient Alexandria, it’s not. Still, the library of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at the University of California, San Diego, is the closest thing the marine sciences have to a central repository of books, periodicals and documents. And like that original Alexandria, this one is threatened by, […]

New Person of LWON: Jessa Gamble

One could spend a great deal of time working out exactly what characteristics unite the various Persons of LWON. (Most Readers of LWON, we cheerfully assume, have more pressing projects to hand.) Our newest LWON-ian, Jessa Gamble, proves emphatically that the link isn’t geographical, by living far enough north that most of us would require […]

Out of the Circus, Under the Microscope

Fleas suck. They also bite. But feeding strategies and a millennia-spanning role in the spread of disease and misery aside, the parasitic insects also happen to be quite remarkable little biomechanical machines. The very definition of minuscule, these wingless wonders can easily jump 100 times their own body length, a skill that scaled to human […]

Tempest in a Garbage Patch

For decades, the oceans were an overlooked domain when it came to environmental awareness. Extinction, it seemed, was something that happened on land and pollution, primarily anyway, was a fate for air, lakes and rivers. That was observation bias, of course: we spend most of our time on land, breathing air and drinking fresh water, […]

The economics of extinction, one tuna at a time

There are many ways to celebrate a new year—for me, it’s by becoming a “person of LWON” and joining some of my favorite science writers at this commodious corner of the web. For fishmongers at the massive Tsukiji market in central Tokyo, however, there’s no more festive way to ring in the New Year than […]