Some years ago, when an insect called the thrips — singular and plural — was in the news for defoliating sugar maples in New England, I noted in my Boston Globe science column that thrips are very strange beasts.
Articles with Education
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Stonehill College campus • Photo by Jennifer Macaulay (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Mission
This week’s Musing is not addressed to the usual visitors to this site, but to friends and colleagues who are concerned about the mission and identity of Catholic institutions of higher education.
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All the old sciences have starring roles
When I was in high school many long years ago, the sciences were the basics — physics, chemistry, biology.
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Chalk at the core of good geology
I spent my childhood clapping erasers in the playground after school.
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A child’s world is better off wild
My walk back and forth to work each day takes me through land in the care of the Natural Resources Trust of Easton, a delightful landscape of woods, meadows, and streams.
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Intergalactic allusions to illusions
There is a week in late November when my walk across the meadows to work in the morning takes me directly into the rising sun. Ahead of me along the double track, as if in a gun sight, the sun lifts its fiery globe above the horizon.
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.
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
The discovery of ignorance
What is the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th-century?
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” • Image by New York Zoological Society (Public Domain)
The hand on the controls is survival
OK, OK already. A thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years could not produce the works of Shakespeare.
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Getting down to bedrock
In 1989, President’s Bush’s “America 2000” agenda set the goals of making US students first in the world in science and mathematics and ensuring that every adult American knew enough about science to participate responsibly in national debates about scientific issues.