26 – 30 November This week, Heather reveals the man behind the jade mask. 932,891,133 galaxies, over a 14,555-square degree patch of the sky, going 3 billion years back into a universe that’s 13.6 billion years old. You can’t comprehend numbers like these, but Ann tells you how to feel them. How big a role […]
Heather
This story begins in darkness—darkness both literal and metaphorical. On a dripping wet day in 1952, an archaeologist stood in a small dank corridor deep inside a pyramid known as Temple of the Inscriptions, in the old Maya city of Palenque. In the shadows ahead, a massive triangular stone door blocked his way. For four […]
12 – 16 November This week, our site went boom. But we’re all better now. Cassie explored the compelling pseudscience behind chronic Lyme’s disease, and why it can sway even people who should know better. Ann considered gravity’s uncompromising brutality. Heather’s chilling story about how Fritz Haber changed her grandfather’s life is a reminder of […]
According to his discharge papers, he stood five feet, eight inches tall. He had a pale complexion, brown hair, blue eyes, two moles on his back, his sole distinguishing marks. In June 1918, he was discharged from the British Army with a disability received in the Great War–a sadly innocent term that people used before […]
Oct. 22 – 26 This week’s posts were unusually beautiful, every one of them, with the exception of Abstruse Goose, who was merely funny. Abstruse Goose shows — not tells — why nobody’s ever going to make a movie about solving a math problem. Junk food everywhere = epidemic in obesity. “We don’t know which […]
This is the kind of story that I love, a story about an ordinary person doing something perfectly ordinary, digging out the last of the potatoes from the garden, say, or chasing off after a dog that’s bolted into the woods, and suddenly stumbling on something wonderfully unexpected, something almost magical, something that abruptly, almost […]
October 8 – 12 This week, Christie remembered Karen, and reminded us that the “beating cancer” narrative is pernicious and false. From his review, I can’t tell if Richard liked Einstein on the Beach, or endured it. Tom tells us about a book made at scales small that light particles are too fat for perception. […]
Sometimes even the very best researchers can’t resist the temptation to be a little cheesy, a little celluloid even, unleashing their inner publicity hounds for a short romp. For how else can one explain the more bizarre titles that occasionally adorn the top of scientific papers: “Acute Conjunctival Inflammation Following Contact with Squashed Spider Remains,” […]