In an essay published after her death, novelist Virginia Woolf wrote about special “moments of being” that sometimes interrupt the gray, nondescript “cotton wool” of everyday life. One of those moments occurred as she was looking at a flower in a garden at St. Ives, in England. It was an ordinary plant with a spread of green leaves. She looked at the flower and said, “That is the whole.”
Articles with 1990
Garnet lherzolite • James St. John (CC BY 2.0)
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Where scientists fear to tread
No issue in science is more controversial than greenhouse warming.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
The invisible drones
Like most social enterprises, science is organized as a pyramid.
Photo by Egor Kamelev from Pexels
Dipping into a formicary
At 65 bucks, this is not a book you are going to rush out and buy. It’s not even a book you will likely want to read. You certainly wont find it on the shelf of your typical mall bookstore, and probably not at the town library.
The Venus of Galgenberg • Photo by Don Hitchcock (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ice Age Venus
From Austria comes word of one of the world’s earliest known sculptures, a female figurine, excavated from Ice Age sediments at Galgenberg, near Krems. This delightful artifact is about 3 inches tall and is carved from green serpentine stone. It has been dubbed the Dancing Venus of Galgenberg.
The TI-36 Solar pocket calculator • Photo by Juhox (CC BY-SA 3.0)
An alternative Top 10
The National Academy of Engineering has announced the ten greatest engineering achievements of the past 25 years. To draw public attention to the excitement of engineering, the Academy sorted through 340 possibilities and chose the following:
Acropora palmata • Photo by Tisquesusa (CC BY 4.0)
Coral reefs and glacial ice
Where would you go if you wanted to study the retreat of glaciers at the end of the last ice age? To the northern parts of Europe and North America, of course. To the places where the glaciers lay upon the land. To the places where ice scraped rock, carved valleys, and deposited ridges of rubble and plains of silt.