Nothing is entirely trustworthy. Friends are inconstant; presidents and professors are making it up; your grandmother didn’t always know what she was talking about; your very senses can fool you; and one of these fine days even the sun will blow up. Where is the touchstone, the standard, the fundamental reference frame? Where is the […]
Nature
It feels right to offer a tribute to Darwin today–St. Valentine was a martyr too, after all.
Fleas suck. They also bite. But feeding strategies and a millennia-spanning role in the spread of disease and misery aside, the parasitic insects also happen to be quite remarkable little biomechanical machines. The very definition of minuscule, these wingless wonders can easily jump 100 times their own body length, a skill that scaled to human […]
As a journalist, I live in constant terror of making mistakes. This anxiety typically simmers just below the surface of my consciousness, occasionally bubbling up to grab me in a full choke hold. But errors are more or less inevitable in this business. And last week, I made one. A new Nature study showed that […]
For decades, the oceans were an overlooked domain when it came to environmental awareness. Extinction, it seemed, was something that happened on land and pollution, primarily anyway, was a fate for air, lakes and rivers. That was observation bias, of course: we spend most of our time on land, breathing air and drinking fresh water, […]
The older I get, the more people I know who have lost what they could not afford to lose. I’ll repeat: lost means gone, unrecoverable, not coming back; and what these people lost, they still need and want. The problem is nearly universal and has no obvious solution, or rather, the solution is idiosyncratic and […]
Ants’ most anthropomorphous characteristic is the facility with which they go to war with their neighbors.
There are many ways to celebrate a new year—for me, it’s by becoming a “person of LWON” and joining some of my favorite science writers at this commodious corner of the web. For fishmongers at the massive Tsukiji market in central Tokyo, however, there’s no more festive way to ring in the New Year than […]
