Daylight Deltas We have seasons on Earth because of our planet’s axial tilt. In relation to the ecliptic – the orbital path Earth takes around the Sun – we’re slanted just over 23 degrees from an “upright” position, based on the planet’s spinning axis. As we go around our star, this tilt causes one hemisphere […]
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death & the Mother of Forensic Science To Mrs. Frances G. Lee, Captain, New Hampshire State Police, And One of the Few Women Who Ever Kept Perry Mason Guessing –Erle Stanley Gardner, The Case of the Dubious Bridegroom In Chicago, on 25 March 1878, John Jacob and Sarah Frances Glessner welcomed a
Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death & the Mother of Forensic Science Read More »
Corn Sweats We’ve editorialized multiple times about how fantastic firefly season is. Late June, early July, when the insects come out to tap Morse code in the grass, the days are long, the temperatures are warm, but the humidity has not ravaged our will to go outside. The love for this window is not a blanket
The Red Queen Hypothesis Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. –Red Queen, Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass Undoubtedly, one of the greatest scientific revolutions transpired in the mid-1800s, as Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace advanced the theory of evolution. Borne time and again
The Red Queen Hypothesis Read More »
Mostly Clear vs. Partly Cloudy We love to hate on weatherpeople and their nebulous percentages. How can they get it so wrong? As it turns out, meteorologists are increasingly accurate. Graphic by Hannah Ritchie Even if we concede that the weather prognosticators have improved, perhaps some of their success comes from vague wording. For example,
Mostly Clear vs. Partly Cloudy Read More »
Hay Fever Many people cite spring and fall as their favorite seasons. The moderate temperatures and humidities allow us to enjoy the outdoors without freezing or heat exhaustion. For billions of people on Earth, however, these in-between seasons don’t arrive string-free. Spring and autumn can bring a punishing reaction to nature’s rhythms: seasonal allergies. Colloquially termed hay
The Fujita Scale The highest wind speeds on Earth come from tornadoes. Needless to say, things that cause the highest wind speeds can produce massive amounts of damage to human-created infrastructure and natural surroundings. Though we have made progress in tornado science over the past century, much about the mechanisms and materializations of the storms remains
Lunistices Though the sky is filled with immeasurable objects – galaxies, stars, asteroids, Uranus – two of them dominate our perspectives: the Sun and the Moon. Most celestial bodies feature tangible but often imperceptible cycles, thanks to Earth’s rotation, but our star and our satellite grace us with significant patterns. Our definitions of time and
The Anatomy of a Lunar Eclipse One of the English language’s most sublime words is syzygy. A syzygy occurs when at least three celestial bodies align in a plane. Note: the following images are not to scale! When we think of syzygies, we often think of the Earth, Sun, and Moon, but any three bodies could
The Anatomy of a Lunar Eclipse Read More »
Candle Ice Thanks to its molecular makeup, water forms a hexagonal, crystalline structure when it becomes ice. Since ice is less dense than water, it floats. Not only is this great for drinks, but it also keeps large bodies from freezing from the bottom up. This attribute allows for a rather obvious but perhaps unpondered