roots. Matchboxes for beds. Bottlecaps for tables. Thimbles for bath tubs. Postage stamps for carpets.
Leafcutter ants • Photo by Pjt56 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Photo by Pavel Herceg on Unsplash
Can a body meet a body coming through the wire?
There is a now-famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner that has come to define the age of electronic communication. It shows two dogs sitting in front of a computer. One pooch says to the other: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
A statue of Thoreau at Walden Pond • Photo by Chris Devers (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
An unvarnished look at Thoreau
In recent years we have seen a spate of books on Henry David Thoreau — his writings, his life, and the landscape in which he lived. The best of the lot is David Foster’s “Thoreau’s Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape (Harvard 1999).”
A great blue heron takes to the air • Photo © Tom Raymo
Finding inspiration in a blue heron
If you have ever watched a jumbo jet take off you will know what I mean.
Artist's impression of the current oldest known galaxy, GN-z11 • Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Peering through the Hubble Telescope to our distant past
A few weeks ago, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope said they discovered the most distant object yet observed in the universe — a galaxy 13 billion light-years from Earth.
Samuel Pepys, from a portrait by John Hayls (Public Domain)
A Brit bureaucrat enthralled with science
I don’t know if high school kids today read Samuel Pepys’ Diary. Back in the 50s even parochial school students were exposed to bits of the diary — mostly Pepys’ accounts of the Great London Fire of 1666 and the plague.
An abandoned village in the Bahamas • Photo by Venture Minimalists (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Nature takes back an island village
The abandoned village of Richmond Hill lies at the end of a forest track here, four miles from the nearest paved road on the swampy back side of the island, away from the white sand beaches and breezy ridges of Exuma Sound.
Artist's rendering of the proposed Square Kilometre Array • Image by SPDO/TDP/DRAO/Swinburne Astronomy Productions (CC BY 3.0)
The scientific law of Que Sera, Sera
In his autobiography, the brilliant physicist John Archibald Wheeler makes this confession of faith: “Whatever can be, is.”
Photo by ANIRUDH on Unsplash
The really amazing things are real
People believe the darnedest things.
Illustration of Cassini exploring Saturn • Image by Kevin Gill (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Cassini’s slingshot tour
On the evening of February 23, Venus overtook Jupiter in the evening sky. The two planets gleamed together in a pairing of rare closeness. Both fit neatly into the field of a small telescope, with all four of Jupiter’s Galilean moons.