Take one brilliant middle-school science teacher with a love of hang-gliding. Add a classroom of typical teenagers, a phone book, a stack of printer paper, and a pair of scissors. Watch something truly magical take place, as a fleet of miniature planes takes to the air on gossamer wings. Who wants to work when there are origami planes to fly?
The last time I wrote about the evolution of language, scientists’ theories sounded like contradictory Just-So stories. Some said language began with gestures, like pointing at the food you want. Others said language began with talking, like “look out!” or “hey you, get over here.” Nobody had much solid evidence: language evolved, after all, without leaving fossils. Now, 25 years later, they’re still arguing, but a nice article by Michael Balter in a recent Science says they’re doing it with real data. And so far it looks like evolution didn’t choose between talking and gesturing, it did both. Evolution doesn’t have to choose, it can do whatever it feels like.
Has anyone ever taken a better photo of Stonehenge than the one Harold Edgerton snapped on a dark night near the end of the Second World War, 1944 to be exact? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. When has Stonehenge ever looked so mysterious, so alien, so theatrical, so totteringly old, so alive, so Lord of the Ringsy? Shouldn’t Gandalf be lurking here somewhere?
Edgerton took this photo during a secret Allied military experiment. Continue reading
On a hot summer day, I like to watch a rat or two foraging on the tracks of the New York City subway system. No-one is entirely sure how many of the whiskered beasties live in the city, although, thanks to New York’s electronic rat map, a catalog of rat hot spots such as lived-in burrows and telltale gnaw marks on plastic garbage bags, the population is apparently on the decline.
In short, I am quite fascinated by these rodents, who have so much in common with humans: they share our homes, form social communities, engage in playful behavior (young Norway rats, which originated in Asia, spend a lot of time chasing, fleeing, rolling over, and jumping on each other) and of course they are exceedingly fond of our leftover lollipops and hot dogs. Naturally, if I saw a rat in my own apartment, I would probably leap on a chair, shrieking and clutching my petticoats. It seems that mice have a very similar response – unless they are mutants with an inactive vomeronasal organ.
Exactly one century ago this year, a swashbuckling American archaeologist named Ernest Thompson was wrapping up his investigation of the Sacred Cenote at Chichen Itza, one of the most famous of all Maya sites. Thompson had been long been fascinated by the natural 130-foot-deep sinkhole that was filled in part with water. According to one early account of the Maya, Chichen Itza’s priests cast human beings and precious objects into this cenote as sacrifices, hoping to persuade the gods to send rain, rich harvests, and relief from disease.
So between 1904 and 1910, Thompson employed both divers and dredging equipment to plumb the secrets of the cenote’s waters. He and his team recovered human bones and a host of Maya treasures–from gold finger rings to large rubber balls.
Wait a minute, you say. Rubber balls? Yes, indeed. Continue reading
In 2007, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey had just filled a public database with a gazillion galaxies and Kevin Schawinski, a graduate student, needed a sample of the ones called, for their shape, ellipticals. Identifying shape isn’t something computers are much good at, so Kevin looked for his ellipticals, culling out the spirals and irregulars, by eye. He looked through 50,000 galaxies and decided he had to try something else.
He and his friends set up a website, called Galaxy Zoo, on which the general public would click on a galaxy, then click Spiral or Elliptical. The first day Galaxy Zoo opened to the public, the number of clicks crashed its server, truly, melted the wires. Kevin got his ellipticals, and since then Galaxy Zoo blossomed like fireworks. In three years, 250,000 zooites in over 100 countries have classified 60 million objects. The zooites have found new kinds of galaxies and are seriously learning astronomy. They do it because they want to contribute, because they want to look at galaxies never seen before; they do it for free and for love. Continue reading
Ian McEwan’s entertaining new novel, Solar, contains one of the best descriptions of a bag of potato chips (or “crisps” to the Brits) that I have ever read:
“It was a plastic foil bag of finely sliced potatoes boiled in oil and dusted in salt, industrialized powdered foodstuffs, preservatives, enhancers, hydrolizing and raising agents, acidity regulators, and coloring. Salt- and vinegar-flavored crisps.”
The novel is actually about a sleazy Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, Michael Beard, who steals a student’s plan to create artificial photosynthesis after the student slips on a polar-bear rug, smashes his head on the side of a glass table, and dies. Anyway, it got me thinking about potatoes, or more specifically one of my favorite scientific papers of all time, “Stages in potato consumption in different stages of life in Norway,” published in 2001 in the journal Appetite by Margareta Wandel and her colleagues at the National Institute for Consumer Research in Oslo.
This is the kind of image editors tell me is not interesting, but editors in this case are as wrong as wrong can be. This is a picture by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory. It’s of the universe clear back, close to its beginning. The Herschel looked in far infrared wavelengths at a bare (to us) part of the universe called the Lockman Hole. Every single one of those nearly invisible dots is a galaxy. The red ones are the most distant. I’m close to fainting just at the very sight.
Click to enlarge. Then faint.
Photo credit: ESA/SPIRE and HerMES consortia
