Some atoms, like the ones on the skin of your hand, are happy to give up their electrons. And the electrons congregate in some mysterious way, as AG says, into a band of brothers. The band is relentlessly negative, so when you get near enough to something positive, like a dryer or a doorknob, the […]
Art
It was a great moment, maybe one of the greatest that any Egyptologist has ever experienced. Peering into the newly breeched tomb of Tutankhamun, Howard Carter gazed in rapture at all the wondrous objects lining the pharaoh’s tomb. There were “strange animals,” he later wrote, “statues and gold–everywhere the glint of gold.” As Carter held […]
Ants’ most anthropomorphous characteristic is the facility with which they go to war with their neighbors.
The title is a little joke about a math term, “convergent sequence.” No way on earth can I understand convergent sequences and I doubt if anybody can explain it to me. “Converging consequences” — now that makes a kind of horrible sense, like maybe an east coast snow storm. Anyway. I hope this will be […]
The subtitle of the show is “Art and Magic,” but the word that haunted me when I visited “Houdini,” an exhibit at the Jewish Museum of Art in New York City, was science. The magic was certainly there. The handcuffs that couldn’t hold him. The straitjacket that couldn’t contain him. The thrilling films of Houdini […]
UPDATE: I woke up, looked at the clock, then looked out the window at the moon — no eclipse. “They must have gotten it wrong,” I thought. I looked at the clock again, saw I had misread it, and realized with a little shock of joy, they never get this wrong. Other phenomena of nature […]
Earlier this week I was tickled by a study about dancing insects. European honey bees perform a rump-shaking ‘waggle dance’ in order to tell their hivemates where they’ve found food. The new research showed that when the bees don’t get any sleep, their dance moves become spasmatic and repellent; they clear the floor like a […]
Last Wednesday night, in a swanky hall at Sotheby’s in New York, auctioneer Hugh Hildesley opened bidding for a sculptural masterpiece from the Roman world. Art collectors knew this statue as A Marble Portrait Bust of the Deified Antinous, and Hildesley and his staff expected that it would sell in the two- to three-million dollar range. […]