Debunking Hollywood: Headshot

Last month, Erik took a hard look at a staple in Hollywood’s menu of plot devices: the knockout shot. Now we turn to a movie trope that hits a little closer to home. Our very own Sally needs your help in the investigation: Dear LWON readers, I’m a boxer with a problem: I can’t punch […]

The Institute of Making

The first commercial object I remember coveting – and receiving – was a Spears toy hand loom. I must have been about eight. My family was not one in which children made wish lists for Christmas, let alone by brand name, but my friend Kathryn had this thing and I needed one. I was actually […]

Humanizing details

The Finkbeiner Test for gender-neutrality in science reporting took flight last week, offering female scientists the hope of having their work represented in print without gratuitous pink sprayed all over it. A scientist’s partner’s profession and their family responsibilities are irrelevant unless specifically shown otherwise. But now, I find myself with another journalistic quandary: Strict […]

The Last Word

January 14 – 18, 2013 Cameron discovers the etymology of anatomy: know why the top vertebra in the neck is called the atlas?  Sure you do.  “There’s something delightful about coming across unfamiliar words for all the things that move me through the day,” she says. A swarm of starlings is called a murmuration.  “No […]

The Last Word

31 December – 4 January Well, I guess we made it through 2012 without dying. So, drink up and get back to work. Heather wrote about the strange therapeutic, cultural, and linguistic history of the tattoo. Guest poster Emily Underwood examined a part of the body so complicated that it requires 10,000 processors to simulate. […]

The Last Word

3 – 7 December 2012 This week, Richard Branson’s spaceflight-for-megabucks scheme might be the trending, but Heather is far more interested in the intriguing history of the Zambian space academy. It’s a great post – not least because of the utterly hypnotic video – but can I get a show of hands for anyone who […]

The Smoking Hills

In 1850, British Captain Robert McClure and his crew ventured in the Investigator to the Arctic, with a walrus-shaped figurehead leading the way in search of the lost Franklin expedition. Unlike ill-fated Franklin, McClure employed an Inuit translator and was able to engage meaningfully with coastal communities along the Arctic Ocean. The team found and […]

The Last Word, Turkey Day edition

November 19 – 23 I hope you nice people in the States had a lovely Thanksgiving. This week, Ginny introduced us to the sleep molecule. Jessa explained the 21st century superbear. It’s a hybrid between a polar bear and a grizzly, and it’s straight out of the anthropocene. Christie considered a status symbol shared by […]