This thing is just simmering soup, circulating oceans, the granules on the sun’s surface, and the driver of the continental plates; it’s just convection. That is, heat rises and cold falls, updrafts and downdrafts, up in the middle and down at the sides: a cell of convection. This convective cell is called a supercell and […]
LWON
I haven’t had anything to do with biology since I wrote an article years ago about sleeping pills. I found out that the drugs used by 60-gazillion insomniacs to put themselves to sleep are not the chemicals the brain uses to put us to sleep naturally. Can’t neuroscientists just find those brain chemicals and sell […]
May we take a moment of your time to introduce Cassandra Willyard? She explained once that the reason she needed to ride around in police cars was to write about why Baltimore was HIV heaven, a logic that’s not immediately obvious. Click on About for more about Cassandra, and then go find her website to […]
I grant this is just straight-up astroporn but let’s try to make it legit. It’s a picture taken in 2009 by the Hubble Space Telescope of NGC 3372, the great nebula in the constellation Carina, which is in the sky over the southern hemisphere. “Nebula” is an old astronomical word that has referred to a […]
I thought I’d made the case against parasitic wasps with evidence and eloquence. I thought that would be the end of it. But no: counter-arguments were made (even if insects did evolve first, Josie, I can still feel superior), gauntlets thrown down, aspersions cast (you think I didn’t notice “delicate flower,” Heather?), and lines drawn […]
I was going about life one day, visiting my step-daughter the entomologist who showed me, in a microscope, a pale green little aphid which was eating a leaf. Inside the aphid was a tiny parasitic wasp which was eating the aphid. Through the aphid’s transparent body, I could see the wasp’s buggy little eyes. I […]
Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February? And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger? And then […]
At 5:04 on the morning of July 16, 2010, I woke up because the bed was vibrating, as was the floor. A small rumbling noise moved through the room and on out, and I thought, “earthquake,” and went back to sleep. It turned out to have been a magnitude 3.6 – pretty big for these […]