The Snowy Desert Between 14,800 and 10,500 years ago, the oldest petroglyphs in North America appeared in limestone at Winnemucca Lake. Today, the lake is a dry bed, but this spot was likely an oasis to some of the continent’s earliest inhabitants. They inscribed the rock with figures that might be trees, flowers, leaves, clouds, or […]
The Great North American Eclipse On 21 August 2017, around 2:30 in the afternoon, I sat in a baking parking lot at The Ohio State University. It was a Monday, and my wife had emerged from the Mathematics Tower to join me during a break between teaching classes. Wispy clouds hung in the sky but did
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Adam’s Bridge One of the gorgeous macro-elements of the globe is the island of Sri Lanka, which seems to fall like a teardrop from the southern tip of India. About the size of West Virginia and home to 22 million people, Sri Lanka features interesting tectonics and geography. Madagascar, for the sake of comparison, sits somewhat
Þrídrangaviti Lighthouse Once they got near the top there was no way to get any grip on the rock so one of them got down on his knees, the second stood on his back, and then the third climbed on top of the other two and was able to reach the nib of the cliff above.
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Rainbow Ghost Planes After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the human viewpoint of Earth radically shifted. No longer were we mere stargazers, now we could watch what happened at home from a lofty viewpoint. Since the first satellite hit space, we have enhanced our abilities to gaze downward to astonishing levels. Governments and militaries
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Fighter Planes Shooting Themselves Down Son, I’m sorry, they got us. — Henry Jones, Sr. If Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade can serve as a real-world guide, the perils of a dogfighter circa World War II stretched beyond incoming fire from the enemy. Gunners had to make sure they didn’t imperil their own craft, too. More modern (and
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The Old-Growth Forest Network This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring oceanSpeaks, and in accents
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Kelimutu One of the best aspects of Google’s Chromecast is the outstanding array of images in its ambient mode, which serves as a wallpaper slideshow. The photographs primarily feature outdoor locations or wildlife, allowing the wanderlusting individual stuck indoors to sample virtually the planet’s riches. Google has no monopoly on this sort of collection. Microsoft has
Apatosaurus vs. Brontosaurus Scientists have definitively identified more than 300 genera and more than 700 species of dinosaurs. These numbers seem surprisingly low; the real total is likely much higher, as we have to dig through hundreds of millions of years of rock for a shot at finding fossilized dino bones. Ask many toddlers, however,
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Paleontologizing We’ve mused multiple times over the years about the duality of technology, in general, and the internet, in specific. The net can capture us in its doom-scrolling, trivial addiction-abyss, keeping us from touching grass for longer stretches than we’d like to admit. Millions of hours of entertainment sit behind a few keystrokes at