In an essay published after her death, novelist Virginia Woolf wrote about special “moments of being” that sometimes interrupt the gray, nondescript “cotton wool” of everyday life. One of those moments occurred as she was looking at a flower in a garden at St. Ives, in England. It was an ordinary plant with a spread of green leaves. She looked at the flower and said, “That is the whole.”
Garnet lherzolite • James St. John (CC BY 2.0)
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
Where scientists fear to tread
No issue in science is more controversial than greenhouse warming.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
The invisible drones
Like most social enterprises, science is organized as a pyramid.
Photo by Egor Kamelev from Pexels
Dipping into a formicary
At 65 bucks, this is not a book you are going to rush out and buy. It’s not even a book you will likely want to read. You certainly wont find it on the shelf of your typical mall bookstore, and probably not at the town library.
The Venus of Galgenberg • Photo by Don Hitchcock (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Ice Age Venus
From Austria comes word of one of the world’s earliest known sculptures, a female figurine, excavated from Ice Age sediments at Galgenberg, near Krems. This delightful artifact is about 3 inches tall and is carved from green serpentine stone. It has been dubbed the Dancing Venus of Galgenberg.
The TI-36 Solar pocket calculator • Photo by Juhox (CC BY-SA 3.0)
An alternative Top 10
The National Academy of Engineering has announced the ten greatest engineering achievements of the past 25 years. To draw public attention to the excitement of engineering, the Academy sorted through 340 possibilities and chose the following:
Acropora palmata • Photo by Tisquesusa (CC BY 4.0)
Coral reefs and glacial ice
Where would you go if you wanted to study the retreat of glaciers at the end of the last ice age? To the northern parts of Europe and North America, of course. To the places where the glaciers lay upon the land. To the places where ice scraped rock, carved valleys, and deposited ridges of rubble and plains of silt.
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Universal peace
Forget for the moment that the actual year of Christ’s birth was probably sometime between 7 BC, when Augustus ordered a census of Judea, and 4 BC, when Herod died. Forget that the season of birth may have been spring, when shepherds watched their newborn lambs by night. Let’s focus on the traditional place and time, Bethlehem in Galilee, on the night of December 24 – 25 in the year 1 BC (as historians reckon).
Vintage Capsela construction toy from Japan • Photo by Adrian J. Hunter (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Toys the mind can play with
Time to take a look at this year’s science toys, and what better place to see what the elves have been up to than the Boston Science Museum Shop? I’m a long way from childhood, but I found lots of stuff I wouldn’t mind finding under my tree.
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Heads and tails and ESP
Few subjects so rattle the equilibrium of the scientific community as ESP — extrasensory perception — especially when it comes tricked out in the garb of science. When the New York Times Magazine published a story on the work of Princeton ESP researcher Robert Jahn, one could almost hear the collective groan rise from the ivy-covered building of that New Jersey campus. This is the kind of research that most scientists would prefer to have at someone else’s institution.