Today, in light of gay pride month and all the gay marriage business all over the news, I thought it might be time we at LWON weigh in on this most hot-button of issues. We look to biology to explain so much about how we interact and why we act how we do. But what does it have […]
Erik
Humans might someday become cyborgs and live forever. Really, that might happen. This was my take on a recent New York Times profile about Dmitry Itskov and his quirky quest to upload human brains into machines by 2045. It seems that this Russian former media magnate and propagandist has started a project to upload a human consciousness into […]
Last year, I reported a story about sharks disappearing in the Sea of Cortez. The story deals with one little spot near the bottom of the Baja Peninsula called El Bajo. El Bajo is famous for two things, I suppose. One, it’s the site where scientists discovered a now-famous behavior in which hammerhead sharks from […]
I am just sitting down to dinner at makeshift cafeteria a few miles away from a Maya dig site, called Xultun, in the jungles of Northern Guatemala. It’s my third day there, and I am still not used to the howler monkeys and giant insects. But most of the students around me have been here […]
Imagine for a second that the country of Mexico was a long funnel, with the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts as the sides of the funnel. And imagine you were to roll a marble down the Pacific side, all the way from San Diego, down Sonora, passed Mazatlan, Jalisco (though it takes a little hop over […]
Today LWON is proud to announce a new intermittent series, ala TGIPF. Every so often our writers will choose a common trope in movies and television – something based at least loosely in science – and pick it apart. If you have any suggestions for topics, drop them into the comments or send them to @erikvance […]
March 4 – 8 This week, Tom delved deep into the mystery of the SCOBY lumps found at the bottom of an old jug of apple juice. Think nature documentaries merely observe? Don’t read Erik’s post. Heather describes the conditions faced by an archaeology writer in the field. If we want to get rid of […]
In 2001, fresh out of college and yearning for adventure, I moved to South Africa. My recollection is that I had seen Cry the Beloved Country and The Power of One several times and decided that I had to go to Africa to intern at the University of Cape Town and write bad poetry. I’ll […]