Every stargazer with a telescope has been looking at Saturn lately. This year the planet reaches the point in its orbit that brings it closest to the Earth. It appears bigger and brighter than at any time in the past 30 years.
Composite image of Saturn and the angle of its rings relative to Earth from 1996 to 2000 • NASA Hubble (CC BY 2.0)
Photo by James Baltz on Unsplash
Jury still out on GM food’s effects
Last summer, I bought a prepackaged chocolate cake in a European supermarket. The wrapper proclaimed prominently: NO GM INGREDIENTS. GM, of course, stands for “genetically modified.”
Photo by Taha on Unsplash
Where nature and nurture can’t agree
NATURE: Well, my friend, you must admit that I’ve had quite the best of it lately. The human genome has been sequenced. Thousands of human genes have been identified, and hundreds more are sorted out every month. The floodgates are open.
Bahama woodstar • Photo by Under the Same Moon... (CC BY 2.0)
The power behind our invisible cells
For several weeks now I have been living with a pair of hummingbirds — Bahama woodstars, tiny creatures, about the size of my little finger.
Columbus landing in the West Indies, as depicted by John Vanderlyn
The Columbus myth
My favorite picture book when I was a kid told the story of Christopher Columbus.
Caenorhabditis elegans • Image by Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A dialogue on a worm
“If you haven’t already met Caenorhabditis elegans, you really should. This little worm…” “Worm?”
Annie and Charles Darwin
Darwin and his daughter
Perhaps no other scientist has attracted more biographers than Charles Darwin. And deservedly so. No other scientist has had a more profound effect on how we understand ourselves and our place in nature.
Helicodiceros muscivorus, or dead-horse arum • Photo by emmapatsie (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Hooray for plant sex
Panegyric. There’s a word that’s not used much anymore. Elaborate public praise. A formal composition intended as a compliment.
Photo by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash
The discovery is the thing
Which of the following works would you choose to be lost, if only three could be saved: Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity.
Detail of a Hubble Space Telescope mosaic image of the Crab Nebula • NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University)
Appreciating our bizarre universe
On the evening of January 4 [2003], Saturn passed in front of the Crab Nebula.