Doc, you’ll remember me. I am the fellow who was here a little more than a year ago — worrying about rocks from the sky.
Articles from November 2021
Artist's impression of an Earth impacting asteroid• Illustration by Kevin Gill (CC BY 2.0)
A tiger swallowtail • Photo by Tom Raymo
Beauty and the brain
It was one of those blessed days. In the morning I saw a tiger swallowtail butterfly.
Photo by Renee Grayson (CC BY 2.0)
Kindred spirits
“A lifetime can be spent in a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree,” writes Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson in his autobiography.
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
The discovery of ignorance
What is the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th-century?
A cross-section from the Visible Human Project • National Library of Medicine (Public Domain)
One male: sliced thin and digitized
Start with a male human cadaver.
The doomed star Eta Carinae • Jon Morse/NASA/STScI (Public Domain)
From terrible violence came the elements of life
Author Doris Lessing began her sci-fi chronicle of space with this dedication: “For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our home in Africa, watching the stars.”
A well-preserved fossil Scipionyx discovered in southern Italy • © Giovanni Dall'Orto
Out of the darkness
“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world,” wrote the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” • Image by New York Zoological Society (Public Domain)
The hand on the controls is survival
OK, OK already. A thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years could not produce the works of Shakespeare.
A SpaceX launch in June 2019, which carried a secondary payload of Celestis customer remains • Photo by SpaceX (CC0)
Hair-brained in space
Man’s quest for immortality knows no bounds of absurdity.
Drosophila melanogaster • Photo by Sanjay Acharya (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Lord of the flies
I opened the garbage bin under the sink to toss out a grapefruit rind. Out puffed a soft cloud of tiny insects.