Why do killdeers build their nest on open ground?
Biology
The nest of a kildeer • Photo by David Moulton (CC BY 2.0)
Rattus norvegicus • Photo by Pete Beard (CC BY 2.0)
13 ways of looking at a rat
The rat in the attic is nocturnal. All night long it scampers in the dusty pitch between the rafters, making a noise like fingernails drumming on tin. At dawn, it gnaws on something in the wall. Is it excavating an entrance into our space, the space of light?
Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels
Why is all this sex necessary anyway?
“What’s the story of love?” I posed the question to Dr. Henry Testosterone, noted evolutionary biologist.
Photo by Hadis Safari on Unsplash
Beastly idea: beauty’s only gene deep
Beauty, having replaced her father in the palace of the Beast, sat down to table. The board was spread with dainty morsels of every kind and delicious drinks.
Detail from Goya's “The Disasters of War”
The evil that men do
If I remember rightly, I was about 12 years old when I first came across Francisco Goya’s collection of etchings called The Disasters of War.
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.
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.
Detail from “The Old Man in Love” by Lucas Cranach the Elder (ca. 1530)
And now, the dirty-old-man gene
Stop the presses! Scientist makes astounding discovery!
Typical gut bacteria grown in a petri dish • Image by Nicola Fawcett and Christopher Wood (CC BY-SA 4.0)
No more free lunch at this table
You may want to stop reading now. I want to talk about microbes. And to start with, I want to talk about the microbes that inhabit the human body.
Image by Mehmet Pinarci (CC BY 2.0)
Finding mystery in God’s tinkertoy
Forty-one years ago today [in 1953], James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper in the journal Nature announcing their discovery of the structure of DNA.