The Wallace Line & Biogeography When the age of exploration yielded to a period not simply of unlocking new areas of the globe, but of serious, timely examinations of those areas, the study of Earth’s biology began in earnest. In the middle of the 18th century, Carl Linnaeus noticed patterns in the similarities and differences …
No Mow May Few things have obtained the hegemony in the American landscape as that of the short, manicured lawn. Aesthetic edges and flat seas of green can appeal to our sense of geometry and order. But these yards are a relatively modern invention. Humans transitioned from natural spaces to gardens and grasslands for livestock …
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 …
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, …
Tree Speak and the Wood Wide Web Traditionally, we have viewed trees as individuals, stoic as they compete for sunlight, survive storms, and slowly grow from tiny seeds to monstrous sentinels. This viewpoint is human, a sort of anthropomorphized version of a natural-resource economy or a misunderstanding of Darwinism. Only the strong trees endure, as they …
Trinity Batter my heart, three-person’d God — John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. — Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered the possibility of nuclear fission. Physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch realized the breakdown of radioactive elements could produce a weapon of planetary proportions. …
The Center Spins A couple of years ago we learned we might need to reevaluate the layout of the planet that we learn in grade school. Instead of the quartet of crust, mantle, liquid outer core, and solid inner core, researchers used waves from earthquakes to determine the inner core might actually be comprised of two distinct …
Cat-Ice Most topics we explore in this project have a significant background of research. Some subjects have such an extensive knowledge base that distilling them into a readable chunk is a laborious exercise in curation. Periodically, an issue pops up with scant information on the internet. This occurrence is a modern rarity; at this point, …
Fission, Fusion, Hot and Cold It’s always a great episode when we get to open with a clip from Back to the Future. In the final scene from the 1985 film, Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown arrives from 2015 to take Marty McFly and Jennifer Parker back to the future. As he attempts to wrangle the surprised …