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 […]
Technology
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 […]
Several years ago, my mom decided to move from Grand Forks, North Dakota — a city of 50,000 — to Lakota, North Dakota — a town of about 700 people. She had grown up in small towns and had no desire to return to one. But Lakota happened to be the midway point between her […]
Christie wrote a post about the suckiness of power-point presentations and of scientific conferences in general. Conferences are an occupational hazard for science writers: walk into a big-city convention center; find Session 425B which is in a narrow, fluorescent-lit room with sliding walls, little chairs in rows, a podium, and a screen; sit down; the […]