Amateur beekeeper Gita Nandan began to suspect something wasn’t right about mid-summer. That’s when her bees’ honey, normally amber, turned the color of cherry cough syrup. After a day of foraging, her bees would return to their Brooklyn hives, their distended bellies glowing bright red. She posted photos on the Facebook page of the New […]
Curiosities
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 […]
Did you know there’s a tenth planet—well, ninth, if you don’t count Pluto—that’s on a collision course with Earth, and the government has built a telescope in Antarctica to monitor its movements, only they don’t want the public to know about this impending doomsday because they don’t want to cause a worldwide panic? It’s true! […]
Each year my mother asks for my Christmas list. No, I’m not eight. I’m more than two decades older than that. Yet she still asks. And I still send one. (I also cc Santa just to be on the safe side.) This year, I’m inclined to ask for a kitchen thermometer. It’s not that I […]
Last week, I had my palm read for the first time. I was spending the day with scientists who study the microscopic bugs living on our skin. (It’s actually not as creepy or smelly as you might think.) One of the researchers, a young and energetic dermatologist, was giving me the grand tour of the […]
This story is so kooky that I must lead with the video: This slow-motion film stars turkeys of different ages, from hatchlings to adults, and yes, they’re furiously climbing a steep wooden ramp. The video comes from a study published earlier this month. But let me start at the beginning.
Cameras are nifty. They take a slice of the hustle and bustle of real life and dip it in liquid nitrogen, preserving it for eternity (or as long as our hard drives last). But they can’t do everything. Try taking a picture of the moon or the stars or a particularly lovely sunset. If you’re […]
The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of relativity and quantum theory. Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside […]