A shiver went up our spines when we read about the recent discoveries at Moula-Guercy cave in France. Archeologists found a treasure trove of 100,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals — our nearest cousins on the human family tree — along with the bones of deer and other animals.
Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis by John Gurche • Photo by Chip Clark (Public Domain)
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
There’s no dot com seen under the microscope
A small green leaf picked up on the college quad. It attracted attention by being small and green in a sea of autumnal colors. I was on my way to the Science Building, so I stepped into a biology lab and slipped the leaf onto the stage of a dissecting microscope.
A bone flute from Jiahu • Image by Cangminzho (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A recently found 9,000-year-old flute still plays haunting melodies
My computer has just been playing a 9,000-year-old seven-holed flute, the oldest playable musical instrument ever discovered.
Photo by Andy Wang on Unsplash
A real cool Jules Verne-like journey
It is a story right out of science fiction. Mysterious Island. Lost World. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Except in this case the story is true.
A partial diagrammatic map of node connections on the internet • Image by Matt Britt (CC BY 2.5)
Built without a plan
The World Wide Web is the first technological artifact that was not built from a blueprint.
American red squirrel • Photo © Tom Raymo
Write good stories, not bad laws
Last weekend at the New England Aquarium Environmental Writer’s Festival, I was asked what I have been doing in this column for the past 17 years. What, I wondered, did “Science Musings” have to do with the environment?
Silicon • Image by Th. Voekler (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The chemical element’s the thing
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em,” says Shakespeare’s Malvolio, reading from Maria’s letter.
Image by Pixabay (Public Domain)
Does the world need smarter mice?
When Mrs. Little’s adopted son arrived at the family home in New York City, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.
Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash
Big thoughts in grapefruit packages
Imagine this: A hundred billion galaxies, each galaxy with a trillion stars, each star with a family of planets as various as the planets of our own solar system, some of them perhaps harboring life and intelligence — an entire universe contained within a physical space the size of a grapefruit.
Portrait of Charles Darwin by John Collier (1883)
Darwin’s dangerous de-evolution
“Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud,” said House Republican Majority Whip Tom DeLay, by way of explaining the school massacre in Columbine, Colorado.