Life without beer: part 2 of my beer & running science experiment

  The question came to me at 10-something AM in the morning. I had just hurdled a flaming fire pit, the finish line of a stupidly steep trail run in the desolate cliffs of Western Colorado. Now I was drinking a can of cold beer I’d pulled from the race refreshment cooler. And damn, if [...]

How I learned to stop worrying and love the radioactive spiderwebs

Last week, the Augusta Chronicle reported that a whitish, spider-web like material had been found growing all over the nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site, a Department of Energy lab in South Carolina. In the 1950s, nuclear materials were readied here for weapons deployment. Now the site is a research lab. The web-like strands [...]

2011 Houdini Awards

I always thought of Harry Houdini as a master trickster, fooling his audience into believing something had happened when, in fact, it had not happened. That’s not true. Houdini’s tricks — like escaping from a locked packing crate after it had been thrown into New York’s East River — were real. His “magic” was that [...]

The Science of Mysteries: Watch Where You Fall In

One day on Twitter, certain science bloggers (see below) who began life on the dark side, in the humanities, happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers.  We thought we might write a series of posts, all on the same day, about the science in mystery books. Mine is by Josephine Tey, “To Love [...]

2011 Science Quiz: The Answers!

There’s only one thing more exciting than science, and that’s a science quiz! We’ll announce the winners in this year’s LWON Science Quiz in just a moment — remember, it was one prize for the best additional question submitted, and one for a random drawing from all the 100% correct answers. But first, a big [...]

Guest Post: the Nature of Octopuses

There is an old story about a scorpion and a turtle. Variants abound, but the basic tale revolves around an unusually talkative scorpion that asks a turtle for a lift across a river. The turtle refuses at first, fearing the scorpion’s sudden but inevitable betrayal. The scorpion insists, the turtle relents, and the two get [...]

2011: The Science Quiz

2011 is drawing to a close, and what a big year it was…for science! Many interesting and important scientific things occurred, and we hope you were paying attention, because here’s your chance to test your knowledge of the most notable scientific developments of 2011 with our super-scientific end-of-the-year quiz! Did you know you can win [...]

Pro Tip: Don’t Fall in the Thames

Last week, I fell in the Thames. I only fell in up to my thighs, but the gaping, bleeding puncture on my shin, inside which I could see geologic-looking layers of anatomy — that was a bad sign. So I found myself at the A&E (that’s ER to you, fellow ‘Mericans) at 4 in the [...]

The Knowledge

A transatlantic phone call ended badly the other day. “You can just turn left at the next light,” I heard my friend tell the New York cab driver over a crackly 3500-mile connection from London. After some muffled but dramatic escalation, she was back. “Can I call you back?” she said. “I just got kicked [...]

Abstruse Goose: Tempus Edax Rerum

Think about this one for a while and see where it gets you.  It just got me confused.  Translating AG’s Latin title — Time devours things — doesn’t help. John Archibald Wheeler was a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and then the H bomb, helped clarify the atom, made up the phrase “black [...]