Let me start with the squid “penis” and get to the mysterious grooves on the seafloor later. Last April an ROV called Little Hercules, cruising around the seafloor in the northern Gulf of Mexico, spotted a distant, possibly cephalopod-like shape. As Little Hercules got closer, NOAA researcher Mike Vecchione reports in the mission log, “the […]
Cameron
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 […]
When I was a teenager, my dad installed a timer on my bedroom light. After 45 minutes, the light would flash a few times. Then, darkness. My dad was tired of me falling asleep with my light on. It was such a waste of energy. This, he said, was the perfect solution. I started thinking […]
We now return to our occasionally-scheduled Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in […]
The other day, just as I was about to go out on the water on a nine-foot piece of epoxy-covered foam, a man stopped me on the beach. “Aren’t you scared to go out there by yourself?” he said. “Because of the sharks?” I had been trying to forget about them, even though the sun […]
I love snow, but we don’t get much of it here. On the rare day that the highest peaks catch a few flakes, people pile into cars and drive up into our local mountains just to see a small patch of white. Part of the allure is the wonderful way in which snow is described […]
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 […]
A science writer friend gave me these great nerdy baby flash cards when my older son was born. I’ve been hoarding them for myself until they got discovered last week—hoarding them both because they’re charming (and for the moment, unsullied) and because once they were spotted, I would have to start explaining what each one […]
