Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February? And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger? And then […]
Curiosities
Abstruse Goose has the same problem I do but proposes a solution. Luckily, says Abstruse Goose, not everyone needs to “see so far under the hood.”
It’s one of the pitfalls of science journalism: Assigned a story, we rush madly off, interviewing scientists galore, gathering mountains of eclectic facts we’re sure our readers will love. Alas, it’s often impossible to cram all these facts on the printed page, because magazines have space constraints. C’est la vie. But hey, this is the […]
At least 40 million people worldwide have been prescribed Prozac, but how many of them know that they may be sharing their medication with a crowd of shrimp? The poor shrimp aren’t any happier, either: the antidepressant prompts them to swim upward toward the light, which makes them more likely to be eaten by predatory […]
It’s summer. The perfect time to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Or, if that proves too taxing, just flop onto the grass and watch all the little invertebrates toiling away: an ant carrying a crumb or a seed, a beetle scurrying over grains of sand, a grasshopper leaping. Beneath the surface is a vast […]
When I was a child, my grandfather took me to London’s Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons. Thousands of these statue-splotchers covered the square, feeding on seeds offered by the outstretched hands of excited tourists. It must have been a favorite outing, because he also took my mother and her cousin (left) out for a […]
Take one brilliant middle-school science teacher with a love of hang-gliding. Add a classroom of typical teenagers, a phone book, a stack of printer paper, and a pair of scissors. Watch something truly magical take place, as a fleet of miniature planes takes to the air on gossamer wings. Who wants to work […]
On a hot summer day, I like to watch a rat or two foraging on the tracks of the New York City subway system. No-one is entirely sure how many of the whiskered beasties live in the city, although, thanks to New York’s electronic rat map, a catalog of rat hot spots such as lived-in […]
