July 1 – 5 This week, Erik traveled to Bolivia in search of water that’s more acidic than battery acid. He succeeds: “Opening my eyes I see that it looks like an orange sort of runny syrup and feels like it’s full of lead.” DNA “rots” in the heat, which is why ancient genomes are […]
Miscellaneous
June 24 – 28 In light of all that happened this week, Erik looked at what the animal kingdom teaches us about being gay, and wonders why we insist on looking to the animal kingdom for lessons at all. So that mermaids show was a hoax, but Roberta had some good news about real mermaids. […]
Half a lifetime bent over peering into people’s mouths had left Martha Podleschak with spine problems. One of the job requirements for a dentist is a constant, slightly sideways forward tilt. According to her x-ray technician, Podleschak’s particular leftward lean had compressed the discs between her vertebrae, causing a pattern of extreme wear on the […]
Today, in light of gay pride month and all the gay marriage business all over the news, I thought it might be time we at LWON weigh in on this most hot-button of issues. We look to biology to explain so much about how we interact and why we act how we do. But what does it have […]
We were a ragtag bunch at the KyoRyuKan theatre in the year 2000, all washed up there for different reasons. One man had been a master kimono maker before his building burned down and he lost everything, including all of his precious silks. Another man arrived promptly at nine every morning to ride out the […]
June 17 – 21 “I think girls very much do want to be JASONs and they want to be in DARPA, they just don’t always know it, so we need to get them to read about it.” This week, Ann asked defense journalism powerhouse Sharon Weinberger to add her two cents to the ongoing LWON […]
“If, for example, I say that ‘the train arrives here at 7 o’clock,’ that means, more or less, ‘the pointing of the small hand of my clock to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events.’” […]
Two weeks ago, for the first time in 15 years, I flushed the toilet inside my house. This — and by “this” I mean the 15 years of non-flushing — was not quite as gross as it might sound. Until very recently, my family and I lived off the electrical grid in rural Colorado, in […]
