I swear, you could get a good start at being a practicing geologist, just from looking at maps. These lovely looping patterns are a satellite’s view of some mountains in southeastern Oklahoma. They are the Ouachita, pronounced Wachita and mispronounced Wichita. I’m fond of the Ouachita – they’re sleepers. And given what went on underneath […]
Ann
Big problems for astronomers: the just-launched zillion-dollar Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t be focused; a Mars probe got to Mars and then lost contact with the earth; the 300-foot Green Bank radio telescope collapsed one night into lacy rubble. Smaller problems are below. An amateur astronomer, after observing on his back porch one night, locked his […]
This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection. That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides: a cell of convection. This convective cell is called a supercell and […]
I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills. I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the chemicals the brain uses to put us to sleep naturally. Can’t neuroscientists just find those brain chemicals and sell […]
I’m riddled with anxieties and have no faith whatever. My book is dopey and nobody’s reading it and I have no ideas for another one. Print publishing is dying anyway. And the deader it gets, the less likely it is to publish anything I write, even if I did have an idea. I could […]
A book I just read said that while the sun once held a gloriously central place in the lives of men, it has now been sidelined and downgraded by science — which I disagree with, you can’t find a more dedicated sun worshipper than a solar scientist. The book’s complaint is standard English major stuff, […]
Galaxy Zoo — the citizen science project with hundreds of thousands of citizens classifying galaxies, catching supernovae, mapping the moon, finding solar storms, and so on far into the night – has sprouted a new project called Old Weather. The reason old weather is more interesting than, say, old socks, is that yesterday’s weather is […]
Scattered around the periphery of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are upwards of 150 odd creatures called globular clusters. They’re little agglomerations of stars that are bound by gravity into a sphere and that inside it, are buzzing around like flies. They’re odd because 1) most stars come in singles or pairs, and globulars have […]
