The other day I was walking home and I noticed that the local herbal remedy place in the neighborhood had closed down. It was a cheery place, with pictures of flowers on the windows, and often a pretty girl outside to lure in customers. It may have been a tad corporate-looking but I never really […]
Miscellaneous
A bear broke into my wife’s old teardrop trailer in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southern Colorado. It must have been yearling by the bite marks in bean cans, and the smallness of its hips where it busted out the door-window and dragged itself inside. The bear didn’t find much, leaving […]
June 23 – 27, 2014 Guest Christine Grillo wonders whether, once climate change hits, California will get tired of sending Baltimore avocadoes. Turns out the last Baltimore winter killed her fig tree. “Stunata,” her uncle says. Science writers had a meeting about actually Doing Something about this eternal gender bias crap. Christie reports, and I […]
Back in early 2013, an email discussion among friends turned into a realization. We were having the same tired discussions about gender bias, over and over. The details might vary slightly, but it was the same story, again and again, and nothing was changing. It was time to go public and start looking for solutions. […]
June 16-20 This week, Craig follows an undammed South American river from beginning to end. “The water itself did not know to whom it belonged. It obeyed gravity, streaking mountain sides with streamers and cascades.” Cameron investigates all things feet, those much-abused appendages that carry us swiftly across the soccer field or not so swiftly down the aisle of a […]
Tom Painter, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, studies snow hydrology in mountains around the world. He’s also a leading expert on the thermodynamics of fairies and princesses. Painter started his fairy-princess sideline a few years ago, when he was asked to lend his expertise to Tinkerbell: Secret of the Wings. In the movie—bear with […]
June 9 – 13, 2014 This week Michelle convinces us that cryptozoology has never known a stranger — nor more adorable — creature than the moose-like hugag. It is the creation of William Cox, and surely the ancestor of the heffalump. Richard kickstarts a memetic phenomenon with the phrase, “telling the fire by its ashes” […]
Next week, in the July issue of Scientific American, you can read a story I wrote about the fascinating archeological site of Teotihuacan. You may remember it as the Mexican site I wrote about in 2012 with an almost magical ability to draw in hippies. The story focuses on our growing understanding of the politics […]
