“Big-Game Hunters From Mars Gunned Down Our Dinosaurs,” screamed the banner in the tabloid at the supermarket checkout counter. The story under the headline described fossilized dinosaur skulls supposedly found in France that are pierced by neat round holes.
Articles from October 2019
Hadrosaur skeleton at the Field Museum, Chicago • Photo by Lisa Andres (CC BY 2.0)
Photo by Angelina Litvin on Unsplash
Struggling to cope without computers
My word processing computer is on the fritz, so I am writing this column with a pencil on a pad of paper. It took me a long time to find the pencil. I had to buy the pad of paper.
Castle Bravo nuclear test • United States Department of Energy (Public Domain)
Thinking about the unthinkable
It is often said that nuclear war is “unthinkable.” But it is thinkable. There are hundreds of scientists whose business it is to think about the weapons of nuclear war — how to use them, how not the use them, how to build them, how to get rid of them, and what the consequences of their use might be.
Photo by Zunnoon Ahmed on Unsplash
The Grinch that stole mystery?
I have a friend who speaks of science as an island in a sea of mystery. It is a lovely image, and it seems to me an accurate one. We live in our partial knowledge of the world as the Dutch live on polders claimed from the sea. We dike and fill. We dredge up soil from the bed of mystery and build ourselves room to grow.
Image by Josef Reischig (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Eons of sex
How could I resist a book with a chapter called “Three Billion Years of Sex?”
Photo by Athanasios Bogris (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Even Galileo may have fudged
Two weeks ago, a team of researchers at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute retracted a paper published earlier this year [1986] in the journal Science. The paper reported the discovery of a molecule called interleukin-4A, which was said to play a role in amplifying the immune responses of the human body. The isolation of the molecule was considered a promising step in the search for a cure for cancer.
Galileo demonstrating his telescope
Scanning the skies — past and future
As the sun goes down on the last day of the 20th century, Mars will be shining in the southwestern sky. In the south, Jupiter and Saturn will be brilliant neighbors in the constellations Pisces and Aries. The next morning, as the sun rises on a new millennium, Venus and a crescent moon will precede the sun into the sky.
Tobacco plant with firefly gene • National Science Foundation (Public Domain)
A tale of a firefly and a tobacco leaf
By now you may have heard the joke. Question: What do you get when you cross a firefly with a tobacco plant. Answer: A cigarette that lights itself.
Dinosaur tracks in Dinosaur Valley State Park, Texas • Photo by Fredlyfish4 ((CC BY-SA 3.0)
Dinosaurs and creationists
Down on the Paluxy River in Texas, there are fossil footprints of human beings in the stratum of sedimentary rock that bears the tracks of dinosaurs. Or so claim the adherents of some fundamentalist religious groups.
Burdock hitching a ride • Plant Image Library (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Hitchhiking for survival
This is the season of the grabbers and clingers. I came home from a walk in the woods with enough seeds stuck to my clothes to start my own weed patch. Bloom time for the wildflowers is past; now is the time when the seeds go traveling.