Mojave Max Many Americans are familiar with Punxsutawney Phil, the prognosticating groundhog of Pennsylvania, and a slew of other weather-predicting rodents, including Buckeye Chuck, Wiarton Willie, Dunkirk Dave, and Staten Island Chuck. We rouse these groundhogs from hibernation on February 2 for the purpose of telling us the future of the struggle between winter and spring. …
Flaco, the Owl of Central Park On the night of February 2, workers at the Central Park Zoo, a 6.5-acre facility in the southeast corner of New York City’s famous garden, started the rounds to check on the animals. When they approached the enclosure that housed a Eurasian eagle-owl, named Flaco, they discovered a gaping …
Nazaré and the World’s Largest Waves Like tornadoes and mountains, ocean waves are a form that seems to have a primal impact on humans. Their shapes, sounds, and monotonies are alluring, but they also feature a fear-inducing monstrosity. The looming tsunami wave is a moving wall from which one cannot escape. Millions of years of …
Horsepower Sometimes the units we use are downright bizarre. The metric system makes all sorts of sense, but, in the United States, we’ve decided to stick with standards that include the width of human feet (foot), the width of human thumbs (inch), the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow in a day …
500 Days in Timecave “I said: ‘Already? Surely not.’ I hadn’t finished my book.” –Beatriz Flamini On 21 November 2021, mountaineer and endurance athlete Beatriz Flamini descended into a Spanish cave. Russia had not invaded Ukraine. Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t dead. The James Webb Space Telescope had not yet probed the cosmos. When Flamini emerged from the cave …
The Dawnland Dedicated to Sloane Acadia For at least the last 12,000 years, Indigenous Americans have inhabited a region of the Atlantic Coast, including Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and parts of Quebec. The people called this land Wabanakik. A group of nations – the Maliseet, Mi’kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and …
Apgar When a baby joins our planet today, doctors or nurses evaluate them at one minute old and again at five minutes old, using a system called the Apgar Score. Five attributes each receive a score of 0-2, making the overall score a range between 0 and 10. If you have a child in modern times, …
Visualizing Wind Speeds We recently learned about the Beaufort Scale. In the early 19th century, Sir Francis Beaufort sought to create an empirical system for describing wind speeds, in an effort to make communication about conditions useful to mariners. As the scale matured, it moved from informing dedicated sailors to anyone on the water to anyone …
The Beaufort Scale The son of a cartographer, Sir Francis Beaufort was born in Ireland, despite the French last name, in 1774. His father instilled attention to the accuracy of charts and information, but his grasp on the value of these accuracies sunk in with literal meaning when he was shipwrecked due to erroneous graphs …
ʻOumuamua Our solar system is a big place. We sent the Voyager probes on a one-way trip out of the sun’s domain in 1977. It took the two crafts more than 35 years to reach the edge of the heliosphere, the point where they entered interstellar space. And they only had to travel approximately the …