The Hubble is out of trouble, NASA assures us.
Articles from January 2021
NASA astronaut repairing the Hubble in December 1993 • NASA (Public Domain)
Photo by Mike Lewinski (CC BY 2.0)
Lighting up your love life
Along the tidal rivers of Southeast Asia, thousands of male fireflies gather in trees at dusk and flash their bioluminescent lights in an attempt to attract the female of the species.
Photo by slgckgc (CC BY 2.0)
It’s no place for grown-ups
“I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration
of a flock of wild birds.”
Photo by visuals on Unsplash
In search of the soul
Writing about genetic experimentation in the New York Times, columnist Nicholas Wade says, “The secret of life is out: There is no secret, no black box that protects the biological machinery from manipulation nor a soul undefilable in the chemist’s retort.”
Caenorhabditis elegans • Image by Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Making a new Methuselah
An Irish proverb describes life this way: “Twenty years a‑growing. Twenty years in bloom. Twenty years fading. Twenty years a‑dying.”
The fossilized remains of "Nari" • Photo by Akrasia25 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
What our ancestors’ fossils don’t tell us
I’ve been living with the kid for three weeks. He stands in the corner of my office, dead still, staring blankly. I call him Nari.
Illustration of red blood cells (Pixabay)
The consortium that is ourselves
I’ve been thinking about Lewis Thomas.
Detail of red-tailed hawks from J. J. Audubon's “Birds of America” (Public Domain)
The slaughter of the innocents
A still November morning. Brittle, transparent, like glass. Suddenly shattered.
Image by Les Meloures (CC BY-SA 3.0)
There’s much more going on here than play
Years ago, when my children were young, we lived for a year in London, not far from the famous Harrods department store. A favorite family outing was a visit to the toy department. While the kids busied themselves with dolls, trains, scooters, and skip ropes, Dad focused on the construction sets.
Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
On the first day, there was a big…
The universe began with the Big Sneeze. A creation myth from Egypt of the third millennium B.C. has God bring the world into being with a sneeze. It’s not a bad image for the Creation as currently described by astronomers.