It is a story right out of science fiction. Mysterious Island. Lost World. Journey to the Center of the Earth. Except in this case the story is true.
Articles from February 2022
Photo by Andy Wang on Unsplash
A partial diagrammatic map of node connections on the internet • Image by Matt Britt (CC BY 2.5)
Built without a plan
The World Wide Web is the first technological artifact that was not built from a blueprint.
American red squirrel • Photo © Tom Raymo
Write good stories, not bad laws
Last weekend at the New England Aquarium Environmental Writer’s Festival, I was asked what I have been doing in this column for the past 17 years. What, I wondered, did “Science Musings” have to do with the environment?
Silicon • Image by Th. Voekler (CC BY-SA 3.0)
The chemical element’s the thing
“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em,” says Shakespeare’s Malvolio, reading from Maria’s letter.
Image by Pixabay (Public Domain)
Does the world need smarter mice?
When Mrs. Little’s adopted son arrived at the family home in New York City, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse.
Photo by Łukasz Rawa on Unsplash
Big thoughts in grapefruit packages
Imagine this: A hundred billion galaxies, each galaxy with a trillion stars, each star with a family of planets as various as the planets of our own solar system, some of them perhaps harboring life and intelligence — an entire universe contained within a physical space the size of a grapefruit.
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 total solar eclipse of 1999 • Image by Luc Viatour (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In the dark on the Black Sea
It was a long way to go for two-and-a-half minutes of darkness.
Photo by Alice Triquet on Unsplash
Astrology a ‘dirty puddle’
Recently, an astronomer at the Lick Observatory in California found in the institution’s library a horoscope cast by the 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler for an Austrian nobleman, Hans Hannibal Huetter von Huetterhofen.
Photo by Shardar Tarikul Islam on Unsplash
Prying open Darwin’s ‘Black Box’
Some weeks ago I described certain South America ants that tend fungal gardens in underground chambers. They leave the nest to cut bits of leaves from nearby vegetation.