uring my first year at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, I wrote a lot of term papers and played a lot of Tetris on Mac Classics. Squat, sturdy, and pallid, with a postcard-sized monochrome screen, the Classic was three times as heavy as the aluminum-bound MacBook I write on today — with a mere 1/2000 […]
Technology
The University of Victoria conservation field class is rapt. A blowtorch has just been ignited, oomph, and Patrick Keeling, champion of eukaryotes and microbiologist at the University of British Columbia, feeds a straw-thin glass capillary pipette through the hot blue flame. He removes the pipette from the flame and stretches it apart into spun hair. […]
I’ve had occasion in these pages before to write about searches for alien planets and alien life and for both, to register the loftiest disdain. I mean, crissakes, the universe is jam-packed with philosophy-shattering freakshows, and we’re looking for things we already know exist? Planets and life are not news. I learned this outlook from […]
I just wrote a story about robots whose brains are based on the neural networks of real creatures (mostly cats, rats and monkeys). Researchers put these ‘brains’ in an engineered body — sometimes real, sometimes virtual — equipped with sensors for light and sound and touch. Then they let them loose into the world — […]
I don’t know where you’re sitting right now, but do me a favor: zoom out to a space shuttle’s eye-view of your spot on the blue marble. Now spin the globe until you’re looking at exactly the opposite side. If you were here with me in London, our antipodal opposite would be (approximately) New Zealand. […]
I asked my husband, who’s a physicist and a pilot, how airplanes stay up in the air. A question like that makes him happy. “It’s the wings,” he said, “They provide lift.” “What’s lift?” I said. “It’s Bernoulli,” he said. “The faster air moves, the lower its pressure. ” I’m used to these answers that are […]
Turn right at Alamogordo, pass High Rolls, and 9000 feet up into New Mexico’s Sacramento Mountains, turn right again and go 15 miles along a narrow switchback two-lane, turn off on the Apache Point road, pass a pond, and hit the dead end at Apache Point Observatory, a cluster of utilitarian buildings. Inside one building […]
There are a lot of ways to shrink a carbon footprint. Bike instead of drive. Eat low on the food chain. You know the drill. Where I live, in the boondocks of Colorado, a lot of people — myself included, but I’ll get to that in a minute — go on a carbon diet by […]
