Judas knew what he was doing when he double-crossed his friend Jesus. “What will you give me if I betray him to you?” he asked the conspiring priests in the famous Bible story. The story of the Judas Goat is more tragic. She had no idea that she was leading her friends to their deaths. […]
Evolution
This is the third installment of the occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The first was on banana slug sex; the second on Iceland’s Phallological Museum. Today we are going to talk about penis bones. The penis bone, or baculum, is the supportive bone in the penises of most mammals. Relax, you didn’t miss anything: humans […]
To walk from the Charles Darwin Research Station to the center of the town of Puerto Ayora, on Santa Cruz Island, simply follow the “T-Shirt Mile,” a sleepy stone road lined with dozens of souvenir shops. Mugs, onesies and shot glasses pay tribute the town’s only famous resident, a century-old giant tortoise named Lonesome George. […]
This is the third installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read the first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here, and the second, about eerie mounds of black coral, here. If you go to the Galápagos, and even if you go, as I did, in a herd of clumsy American tourists, […]
Every Monday for the next six weeks I’ll be posting about my recent trip to the Galápagos. After a week on a big boat, hopping from one imposing volcanic island to the next, I saw most of the odd creatures that Charles Darwin famously wrote about: century-old tortoises, finches with beaks of all sizes, swimming […]
There’s a song we all like to sing along to at our house. “Popcorn” by the Barenaked Ladies is uptempo, wistful, and propelled towards an explosive crescendo by an onomatopoetic beat. There’s much to love, in other words, but I always get tripped up a little by the first line of the lyric: Mama […]
You may have seen the extensive (and entertaining) press reaction days ago to a recent press release that cited Columbia University chemist Ronald Breslow taking liberties in his paper on the chirality of α-methyl amino acids. Breslow mentioned “advanced versions of dinosaurs,” who may live “elsewhere in the universe.” Gasp! The kicker? “We would be better off […]
This worm is born to travel. It begins life in human lymph, only to seep out of the lymphatic vessels into the grimy fluid that bathes our organs. From there, it drifts into the blood stream. During the day, it keeps to deep veins. Once darkness falls, it migrates up to the skinny veins just under […]
