Each year around Christmas time, Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, chooses the most important science story of the previous 12 months.
Articles from September 2020
Photo by Dexter Fernandes on Unsplash
A green flash at sunset • Images by Brocken Inaglory (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In pursuit of the elusive, ephemeral green flash
The sky is full of tricks of light. Daytime radiances include rainbows, sun dogs, coronas, and glories. Recently, from the coast of Alaska, I saw a circumzenithal arc, the rare and famous “backwards rainbow” that appears high overhead. At nighttime add moon bows, noctilucent clouds, the gegenschein, and zodiacal light.
Photo by Daan Stevens on Unsplash
No place for politics
Cancer. The Big C. The dread disease. AIDS has grabbed more headlines in recent years, but cancer retains its primal grip on our imaginations.
Photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash
In 1992, be it resolved that scientists…
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. The few times I’ve determined to change bad habits my resolve has dissolved sometime around the middle of the first week of January. Oh, well, never mind, there’s always next year.
Photo by Edward Paterson on Unsplash
Night sky’s there for the giving
If Santa has telescopes in his sleigh this year, then he should toss in a few good star books too. Here’s why.
Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash
Beer bubble mathematics
Back in the early 1970s a physicist named Robert March published a popular textbook called “Physics for Poets.” The name caught on. Since that time dozens of schools have offered courses called “Physics for Poets” as ways of attracting non-scientists to the study of physics.
Photo by Andrew Malone (CC BY 2.0)
Winter’s coming and stones are on the march
December. Green plants have rolled up their awnings and closed shop. Even the mushrooms, November’s ragpickers, hunker down to that invisible life that mushrooms live for 11 months of the year.
And the nominees are...
An envelope filled with history’s great scientists
Who was the most important scientist of all time?
"Good gracious, Toto, I don't think we are in Kansas anymore."
Kansas was never like this
“Good gracious, Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore.” No, Dorothy, this isn’t Kansas. It’s Cyberland.
Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash
The psalmist and the astronomer
“Ancient religion and modern science agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.” So says novelist/critic John Updike in a new book on The Meaning of Life compiled by David Friend and the editors of Life magazine.