I swear, you could get a good start at being a practicing geologist, just from looking at maps. These lovely looping patterns are a satellite’s view of some mountains in southeastern Oklahoma. They are the Ouachita, pronounced Wachita and mispronounced Wichita. I’m fond of the Ouachita – they’re sleepers. And given what went on underneath […]
Nature
Amateur beekeeper Gita Nandan began to suspect something wasn’t right about mid-summer. That’s when her bees’ honey, normally amber, turned the color of cherry cough syrup. After a day of foraging, her bees would return to their Brooklyn hives, their distended bellies glowing bright red. She posted photos on the Facebook page of the New […]
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 […]
This story is so kooky that I must lead with the video: This slow-motion film stars turkeys of different ages, from hatchlings to adults, and yes, they’re furiously climbing a steep wooden ramp. The video comes from a study published earlier this month. But let me start at the beginning.
This one’s going to take a little explanation. Maxwell was James Clerk Maxwell, famous 19th century physicist. He made up his demon as a way around a then-new and depressing law of physics, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The Second Law said that when things are left alone and nothing’s done to them, hot things […]
I’m riddled with anxieties and have no faith whatever. My book is dopey and nobody’s reading it and I have no ideas for another one. Print publishing is dying anyway. And the deader it gets, the less likely it is to publish anything I write, even if I did have an idea. I could […]
The last time anyone proclaimed the end of science — at least, this is what I hear — was just before the arrival of relativity and quantum theory. Abstruse Goose’s brave new islands, quantum gravity and dark energy, are going to require new physics, and new physics is like seeing outside the optical, hearing outside […]
Metastable: Down the block, along the street, is a steep bank on which trees have taken root and grown, slanting off the bank and over the road, balancing their holds in the ground with increasing height and occasional high winds and of course gravity. One day sooner or later a good rain slightly liquifies the […]
