My daughter, a geologist, recently returned from a visit to the high Himalayan plateau. She brought me a gift: a gray, naturally rounded stone, of a size that fills the hand with a satisfying heft.
Articles from March 2021
A fossil ammonoid • Photo by Hectonichus (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A wooly bear caterpillar • Photo by Amy (CC BY 2.0)
A furry gram of divinity, curled up in your hand
Woolly bears are on the march. Double time. Making tracks. Trucking.
Detail from "The Last Judgement" by Michelangelo (ca. 1541)
Doom prophets have it wrong — again
Already we hear of Armageddon, in supermarket tabloids, popular magazines, and fundamentalist pronouncements — the first tap-taps of a drum roll of superstitious fervor that will grow in intensity as we approach the end of the millennium, culminating in an apocalyptic hullabaloo in the last days of the year 1999.
Photo by Jasmin Sessler on Unsplash
Life will survive the mess, but will we?
Sunday evening. Jumping up and down on the contents of the huge rolling trash bin, trying to make room for a few more bags — of what? Wine bottles, junk-mail catalogs, computer-printouts of drafts of this column, a week’s worth of Boston Globes and the New York Sunday Times.
The Goggle Eye, or Cercyonis pegala • Photo by D. Gordon E. Robertson (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Playing the name game by other rules
Tradition has it that Adam was allowed by the Creator to name all the creatures of the Earth.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Resurrected bliss, and physics too?
Holey moley! Check out the full-page color ad in the New York Times Book Review two Sundays ago.
Photo by Richard Giles (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Getting cross with wired
Q. What’s Wired? A. That’s easy. Wired is a hot new magazine for technotrendies.
A hummingbird helps to pollinate a cardinal flower • Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash
The colors of the seamless web
My field guide calls the cardinal flower “bright red.” Those simple words inadequately describe the cardinal flower’s electric presence in the ditch. Scarlet? Vermilion? Not enough pizazz.
DDT being sprayed over an Oregon forest in 1955 • USDA Forest Service (Public Domain)
Well, so science isn’t perfect
Two stories from the Science section of Time magazine:
Photo by Olivier Guillard on Unsplash
3 hours of sun means a fine Irish day
It had rained in sheets for 40 days and 40 nights.