In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Miranda grows to the age of sixteen on an ocean isle with no human companions other than her father Prospero and the monster Caliban. When storm and shipwreck bring others to the island she is suddenly awakened to the variety and beauty of mankind. “O brave new world,” she exclaims, dazzled,“that has such people in’t!”
Articles with 1986
Miranda as imaged by Voyager 2 • NASA/JPL
A male European Pied Flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) • Photo by Estormiz (CC0)
Lessons in love from the pied flycatcher
How can I make myself more attractive to the opposite sex?
A bubble chamber photograph of an antiproton/proton collision (Public Domain)
Snaring a Snark
The word from CERN, Europe’s big high-energy physics lab, is that the antiproton has been trapped. The antiproton has been caught and stored for several minutes in a bottle.
A model of human DNA (Public Domain)
Answering the oldest question
“Who am I?” It is the oldest question in philosophy. Socrates asked it. Descartes asked it. Philosophers today are still asking it. And science may be on the verge of breakthroughs that will change forever the way we understand the question.
Hubbard Glacier • Photo by Bernard Spragg (Public Domain)
Glacier disasters
Alaska’s majestic Hubbard Glacier is on the move. An advancing tongue of ice has sealed off the mouth of the Russell Fjord, blocking its connection with the sea. The fjord has has become a 32-mile-long lake contained behind an ice dam, and the level of the lake is rising.
Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash
It’s all there but the thrill
Not long ago the British journal Nature published a report titled “A new class of Echinodermata from New Zealand.” In it the authors describe an animal previously unknown to science, nine of which were discovered on waterlogged wood dredged up from the ocean off the New Zealand coast.
Saint Brendan and his monks set sail for the west (Public Domain)
Ireland’s contender in race for America
Was Columbus was the first European to set foot on American soil, in 1492? You may agree if you are an American of Italian descent. But if you are Norwegian, or Portuguese, or Irish, or almost any other nationality, you will probably have your own candidate for the first European to reach these shores. There is no dearth of entries in the “Discover America” sweepstakes.
Photo by Austin Schmid on Unsplash
Of course, the sky is always falling
Thirty-one years ago, Ann Hodges was sleeping on her living room couch in Sylacauga, Ala., when a 8‑pound rock crashed through the roof of her house and hit her on the side. Life magazine published a full-page photograph of Hodges displaying her bruise and her unwanted trophy from the sky.
Photo by natsuki on Unsplash
Tree book as Yankee as a cod
In the basement of the Ames Free Library in my town of Easton, out of public view, are 14 huge volumes that were among the first acquisitions of the library, and still, after almost a hundred years, remain the largest volumes in the collection.
Our cousin, the sea squirt • Photo by Peter Southwood (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Our cousin the sea squirt
I have a friend, a marine biologist, who haunts the beaches, salt-water marshes, and tide pools of the New England shore collecting the gifts of the sea. Now and then she will find something special that she shares with me. This past weekend she presented me with one of the biggest and finest sea squirts she had ever found washed ashore.