25 February to 1 March This week, Ann blew all our minds with the story of the Farm Hall tapes, the greatest-ever lesson in counterfactual thinking. Also, just off the cuff, who else thinks a dubstep group called “Hitler’s Uranium Club” lurks in our future? Cameron says no one does austerity quite like the people […]
Ann
You probably know this. In August, 1939, Einstein wrote a letter to the American government. German scientists had announced that the energy holding an atom together could be released – in fact, 2.2 pounds-worth of uranium atoms would equal 10,000 tons of TNT. Einstein said this implied a new kind of bomb that Hitler’s government […]
When Rosemary Pryde was four years old, 63 years ago, she lost her hearing. No one knows exactly why: maybe the high fever, maybe the medications, maybe genetic – her father and his mother lost their hearing as adults. She didn’t lose her hearing completely; she had some residual in both ears. When she was […]
January 14 – 18, 2013 Cameron discovers the etymology of anatomy: know why the top vertebra in the neck is called the atlas? Sure you do. “There’s something delightful about coming across unfamiliar words for all the things that move me through the day,” she says. A swarm of starlings is called a murmuration. “No […]
I have an assignment from a magazine to write a profile of a woman astronomer. I am delighted about this: the magazine is excellent, the editors are superb, and the woman astronomer is impressive. I did notice that the assignment came just before the magazine announced publicly it needs to redress its problem with a […]
December 24 – 28 This was Secret Satan week, in which we science writers confronted our secret fears; which subjects do we find most daunting? Why do they scare us? Ann got us off to a great start last week with an erudite explanation of why biology’s not for her. Richard goes into a cold […]
Dec. 17 – 21 Refereeing by a goal-line technology called — as Sally says, “(awesomely), Hawk Eye” — is outsourcing our judgment to a technology and its algorithms. Is that going to work? Given the history of human judgment, sure, why not. Here’s Guest Sujata Gupta with a story about macaques with SIV that get […]
For the holiday season, we here at LWON discussed a series of Secret Santa posts: we would assign one another posts about our own areas of specialization so, say, archeology might be assigned to an eco-writer. Fear erupted. What if I get biology? What if I get physics? Count me out! Then we realized: we could confront […]
