There are many ways to celebrate a new year—for me, it’s by becoming a “person of LWON” and joining some of my favorite science writers at this commodious corner of the web. For fishmongers at the massive Tsukiji market in central Tokyo, however, there’s no more festive way to ring in the New Year than […]
Eco
As we near the end of 2010, everybody’s talking about the biggest science stories of the year. I’ve been thinking about these four: May 20: Craig Venter’s team synthesizes a bacterial genome in the lab, sticks it into an empty bacterial cell, and watches it replicate. Venter calls it the “first synthetic cell“; many headlines prefer […]
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 […]
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 […]
Nature certainly works in dark, mysterious ways. A few weeks ago, we marveled here at the seemingly miraculous return of 35 million sockeye salmon to Canada’s Fraser River, after many people feared that the run was nearing extinction. As Canadians were rejoicing, however, fisheries scientists were frantically working their chalkboards, trying to figure out what on […]
Maybe it’s the advent of the rainy season here on the Northwest Coast, the time of all things mouldy and green. Or maybe it’s just the battle I wage every morning to crawl out of bed when it’s still so bloody dark. But sloths strike me as very simpatico these days. Ok, if you watch […]
It’s a little-known fact that many more tigers live in private captivity in the U.S. than in the wild. As I wrote in my article, Far From the Forests of the Night, published in the February 2008 issue of Natural History magazine, between 7,000 and 15,000 tigers are held in private roadside zoos, circuses, sanctuaries, […]
In 18th century Japan, samurai women modeled themselves after the great beauties of the day. Like courtesans and geishas, they turned their faces into artists’ canvases, concealing their skins beneath a thick white paste. Then they applied the paint–thin charcoal lines for eyebrows, delicate crimson for mouths, and a dark black tint for their teeth. […]