Are you ready for teraflops? Picoseconds? Wait! Before we get to tera and pico, let’s pause to remember mega and micro.
Articles from November 2021
Photo by Laura Ockel on Unsplash
Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash
Life on the water planet
We live on the Water Planet. Nothing confirms this so vividly as a daytime crossing of the Atlantic Ocean at 30,000 feet.
Pholcus phalangioides• Photo by Filipe Resmini on Unsplash
Learning at daddy-long-legs’ knee
For a few months each summer, I live in a cottage in the west of Ireland that is unoccupied for the remainder of the year. When we arrive in June, every nook and cranny is occupied by one or more common cellar spiders, Pholcus phalangioides, sometimes called “daddy-long-legs.”
Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash
To nurture or nature?
Back when I was starting out in science and parenthood, more or less simultaneously, behaviorism was all the rage: Provide the right stimulus, you’ll get the right response.
Photo by Vincent Chin on Unsplash
The bestseller we keep rewriting
“When the pulse of the first day carried it to the rim of night, First Woman said to First Man, ‘The people need to know the laws. To help them we must write the laws for all to see’”
The Cydonia region of Mars, as imaged by the Mars Express spacecraft • ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / Kevin M. Gill (CC BY 2.0)
On Mars, it’s a matter of saving face
Hi folks, I’m your host, Chet Raymo, and this is your favorite talk show, “Let’er Rip.” Our guest today is Barney Bunkum, whose book, “Face-Off on Mars,” takes a hard look at the latest NASA photos from the Red Planet.
Composite image of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter • NASA/JPL/DLR
Adam, Badam, bo-Badam
Legend has it that Adam was allowed by the Creator to name all the creatures of the Earth.
Photo by Sophie Dale on Unsplash
We’re just one big happy family
Summertime! The season of family reunions. And this year I was fortunate enough to be invited to the first-ever Primate Family get-together, as representative of the Homo sapiens branch of the family.
Photo by Ekaterina Shakharova on Unsplash
Whatever are grandmothers for?
Let me ‘fess up: I’m happily married to a grandmother.
A parapsychological experiment • Image by Francis Wickware (Public Domain)
Is it mind over matter, or mind over data?
In a basement lab of Princeton University’s engineering school, a group of scientists is investigating the powers of mind over matter.