Guest Post: the Monsters of Navajoland

A few weeks ago, driving across Navajoland in northeast Arizona, I stopped to see some dinosaur tracks just west of Tuba City. As I pulled into the parking area, on the north side of highway 160, a Navajo man got up from a group sitting in lawn chairs by a hand written “Dino Tracks” sign. […]

The Children’s Hour

There is something rare and elusive on the ceiling of Rouffignac Cave in southern France, something that at first looked like etchings of undulating snakes or bending waterways or even strangely shimmying humans, but that now turn out to be something far more ephemeral and wondrous to my eyes—works of art by very young apprentices: […]

Mapping Baltimore’s Addiction

Baltimore has a hard-core drug problem. The evidence is unmistakable. Head down an alley in the wrong part of town and you’re liable to find a discarded needle, some broken vials, and maybe even a shell casing or two. Why, yes. That was a gunshot. See that guy on the corner? No, he’s not tired. […]

Abstruse Goose: High-Energy Biology

You understand the joke, right? that high-energy physics learns the nature of subatomic particles by hurling them at other subatomic particles and when the particles collide, studying the debris?   So this is funny. Also disturbing. http://abstrusegoose.com/156

Oh no! Not another Iraq

For the last five or six days, I’ve been searching the web for good, reliable news about what is happening to Egypt’s antiquities as the turmoil deepens in Cairo. Are Egyptian artifacts safe in the country’s many museums, protected by soldiers perched on tanks or by human chains of young Egyptians? Or are gangs of […]

Abstruse Goose: Band of Brothers

Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons.  And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers.  The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]

The Battle Brewing over Tutankhamun’s Treasures

It was a great moment, maybe one of the greatest that any Egyptologist has ever experienced. Peering into the newly breeched tomb of Tutankhamun, Howard Carter gazed in rapture at all the wondrous objects lining the pharaoh’s tomb. There were “strange animals,” he later wrote, “statues and gold–everywhere the glint of gold.” As Carter held […]