Science Metaphors (cont): Standard Candle

Nothing is entirely trustworthy.  Friends are inconstant; presidents and professors are making it up; your grandmother didn’t always know what she was talking about; your very senses can fool you; and one of these fine days even the sun will blow up. Where is the touchstone, the standard, the fundamental reference frame? Where is the [...]

Whither the Dorset?

There’s nothing like a lost tribe to pique child-like curiosity. When an isolated band of Brazilian forest people were filmed this year, the world ogled the ochre-painted men with voyeuristic glee. Perhaps we longed for first-hand access to our own ancestor’s lives. One of these lost tribe stories – of the unconfirmed variety – is [...]

New Person of LWON: Jessa Gamble

One could spend a great deal of time working out exactly what characteristics unite the various Persons of LWON. (Most Readers of LWON, we cheerfully assume, have more pressing projects to hand.) Our newest LWON-ian, Jessa Gamble, proves emphatically that the link isn’t geographical, by living far enough north that most of us would require [...]

Abstruse Goose: High-Energy Biology

You understand the joke, right? that high-energy physics learns the nature of subatomic particles by hurling them at other subatomic particles and when the particles collide, studying the debris?   So this is funny. Also disturbing. http://abstrusegoose.com/156

Happy Valentine’s Day, Charles Darwin. There Is No Proof for Your Heresy.

It feels right to offer a tribute to Darwin today–St. Valentine was a martyr too, after all.

Google Earth and Guantánamo Bay

At first glance, the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay doesn’t seem like much of a subject for archaeologists. The controversial camp, built to detain suspected terrorists after the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, seems far too new, far too contemporary for archaeological research. And if that weren’t reason enough to steer clear, Gitmo remains [...]

Out of the Circus, Under the Microscope

Fleas suck. They also bite. But feeding strategies and a millennia-spanning role in the spread of disease and misery aside, the parasitic insects also happen to be quite remarkable little biomechanical machines. The very definition of minuscule, these wingless wonders can easily jump 100 times their own body length, a skill that scaled to human [...]

Rogue Planets

The latest alien planets hit the news like fireworks, I write about them a lot, and I’ve always found them boring.  I’d been convinced early on by an eminent astronomer who said flatly that finding extra-solar planets wasn’t, as he said, interesting.   In the first place, observations were nearly impossible and decades of claims turned [...]