Feeling Feverish? Big Brother Already Knows

You feel lousy. Some old lady sneezed on you in the subway. Now you’re achy and tired and feverish. Face it, Bud. You’ve got the flu. Better just crawl back into bed. What’s that? You have to fly to London? You’ve got an important meeting with a client? Well, I guess I can’t stop you. [...]

1 Volcano+1 Big Storm=35 Million Salmon

Nature certainly works in dark, mysterious ways. A few weeks ago, we marveled here at the seemingly miraculous return of  35 million sockeye salmon to Canada’s Fraser River, after many people feared that the run was nearing extinction. As Canadians were rejoicing, however, fisheries scientists were frantically working their chalkboards, trying to figure out what on [...]

Stars Like Flies

Scattered around the periphery of our galaxy, the Milky Way, are upwards of 150 odd creatures called globular clusters.  They’re little agglomerations of stars that are bound by gravity into a sphere and that inside it, are buzzing around like flies.  They’re odd because 1) most stars come in singles or pairs, and globulars have [...]

Blue Light Special

It’s the end of October—a dark time, and not only because of Halloween ghouls. Today in New York City, we won’t see the sun until 7:19am, and we’ll have to say good-bye at 6:00pm. Each passing day will be distressingly shorter than the day before, until December 21, when the sun will set at 4:31pm, [...]

Ask Mr. Cosmology

Q:  What happened before the Big Bang? Mr. Cosmology:  If I told you, God would have to kill you. Q: What is time? Mr. Cosmology:  Is 9:30. Q:  I just bought a telescope.  Do you have any advice for a first-time sky watcher? Mr. Cosmology:  What happens in Vega, stays in Vega. Q:  How many [...]

Is Organized Crime Cashing In at Pompeii?

The Italian press recently had a field day in its coverage of the sad decline of one of Italy’s greatest tourist draws: Pompeii. In early October, a prominent Italian newspaper ran a front-page editorial on the subject, calling the crumbling Roman ruins a “symbol of all the sloppiness and inefficiencies of a country that has lost [...]

Lies about Astronomy

The coordinate grid was laid against the sky to fix the stars and for centuries it seemed to work as planned.  Recently, however, its framework has been found to be not inertial.  So slowly, almost asymptotically, the grid moves with respect to itself — abrading, degrading — and therefore deteriorates.  In fact, Declination -14 now [...]

Chronic Fatigue Controversy Continues

Allison Futterman can pinpoint the exact day she fell ill. She was at work talking to her boss. “I suddenly felt like a truck hit me. I was weak, dizzy, achy, nauseous and feverish. It felt similar to the onset to the flu, but exceedingly more intense,” she writes. She went home, thinking she had [...]

Napoleon’s legacy: ashes, tombs and DNA

In perhaps the same way that Americans prattle on about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the French never tire of the death of Napoleon Bonaparte. In fairness, the circumstances surrounding the Little Corporal’s later years, death and burial are…unusual. At age 46, he was exiled to the godforsaken island of St. Helena. He was [...]

The Antisocial Network

In his October 8 New York Times op-ed column, David Brooks offered his assessment of the character of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the movie The Social Network:  “It’s not that he’s a bad person.  He’s just never been house-trained.  He’s been raised in a culture reticent to talk about social and moral conduct.” This [...]