My sister gave me a crop circle calendar for Christmas. That’s right, the Llewellyn’s 2000 Crop Circle Calendar, most of the contents of which are drawn from the bucolic countryside of southern England, the Holy Land of the crop circle phenomenon.
Articles from February 2022
Photo by Agent J on Unsplash
The fireball of the world's first nuclear test • US Department of Defense (Public Domain)
Understanding billion-year-old light in a century
What was the most important science story of the century?
Photo by Inbal Malca on Unsplash
Do you see what I see?
“We have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him,” the Magi tell King Herod in Matthew’s gospel.
More closely related to a chimpanzee than a shark • Photo by Jen Milius on Unsplash
Trip to the genome zoo
Come with me to a zoo. Not your usual zoo of animals in cages and corrals. This zoo is displayed on a fold-out chart in the 1999 annual genome issue of the journal Science.
Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash
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.
Photo by Pickawood on Unsplash
The new holiday spirit: E‑commerce
“Folks, don’t get up from your chair. Don’t click that remote to change the channel. The next item we are offering on the Shop-Till-You-Drop Network will change your life.”
The Apollo 12 lunar lander over the Moon • NASA (Public Domain)
Stirring color images from black-and-white lunar landscape
Seldom has a scientific and technological story been turned into higher art than Michael Light’s Full Moon, a volume of photographs from the Apollo missions to the Moon.
Reconstruction of Homo neanderthalensis by John Gurche • Photo by Chip Clark (Public Domain)
Are we what we eat?
A shiver went up our spines when we read about the recent discoveries at Moula-Guercy cave in France. Archeologists found a treasure trove of 100,000-year-old bones of Neanderthals — our nearest cousins on the human family tree — along with the bones of deer and other animals.
Photo by David Clode on Unsplash
There’s no dot com seen under the microscope
A small green leaf picked up on the college quad. It attracted attention by being small and green in a sea of autumnal colors. I was on my way to the Science Building, so I stepped into a biology lab and slipped the leaf onto the stage of a dissecting microscope.
A bone flute from Jiahu • Image by Cangminzho (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A recently found 9,000-year-old flute still plays haunting melodies
My computer has just been playing a 9,000-year-old seven-holed flute, the oldest playable musical instrument ever discovered.