I confess: my secret vice is reading celebrity wedding news. So naturally I read voraciously all the news reports on Chelsea Clinton’s wedding last weekend to Marc Mezvinsky, spending several precious moments examining the ruffles on her gorgeous Vera Wang wedding gown. But I’m also a keen environmentalist, so I was eager to read of any green innovations that the happy couple may have incorporated into their celebration. All I learned was that the bride is a vegan and that the wedding cake was gluten free. Still, in the spirit of nuptial bliss and love for planet Earth, here are some of my favorite recent green wedding stories:
On July 28, 2010, nearly 900,000 galaxies were put into a public database, and this is Galaxy #1, or SDSS J000000.41-102225.6, and don’t tell me astronomers don’t know how to name things. Galaxy #1 is probably an elliptical; the rest of the 900,000 are either ellipticals or spirals or something else, and were identified as such by a few astronomers from notable universities, plus 100,000 housewives, high school students, helicopter pilots, physicians, school teachers, truck drivers, secretaries, and a mobile home park manager. Continue reading →
When Henry VIII wasn’t off wooing new wives and attending to the pressing affairs of state, he was well…eating. Check this out: it’s a look behind the scenes at Hampton Court’s massive, factorylike kitchen. Now here’s a monarch who would have absolutely loved Julia Child.
Art, hypothetical, of a planet, debris, and a galaxy
Remember a month or so ago, when astronomers running NASA’s Kepler satellite announced they’d release the data on 300 possibly earth-like planets but keep the 400 best possibilities proprietary to NASA and announce it all next February? And non-Kepler astronomers, the media, and the internet fussed at the Kepler astronomers for being dogs-in-the-manger? And then everybody forgot about it? This is such a delight: last week, late July, not February, one of the Kepler astronomers publicly announced the discovery of around 140 earth-like planets, a whole galaxy of earth-like planets. I can’t decide whether it’s an example of scientists incapable of following corporate rules, or scientists congenitally unable to keep quiet, or scientists just behaving like the rest of us.
Patricia Sutherland is a very stubborn woman, the kind of damn-the-torpedoes, full-speed-ahead brand of stubbornness that the Scots and their descendants long ago perfected. Sutherland is an archaeologist at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa and one of the world’s leading experts on the prehistory of the Arctic. Silver-haired, bespectacled, and notably fond of pantsuits, she doesn’t look much like a maverick. But since the late 1990s, Sutherland has been turning Arctic archaeology upside down.
Sutherland proposes that 1000 years or so ago, Norse seafarers–better known in pop culture as the Vikings–took part in a kind of medieval get-rich quick scheme in the Canadian Arctic. According to Sutherland,the Norse traded small bits of wood to Arctic dwellers known as the Dorset for luxurious furs and shimmering walrus ivory that could be sold for a king’s ransom in Europe. And Sutherland is not whistling Dixie. She has assembled an impressive mountain of evidence–from Norse yarn, Norse whetstones and other Norse artifacts found at four sites on Baffin Island and northern Labrador.
You might wonder why you haven’t heard about ancient Norse merchants in the Canadian Arctic. The answer is complex but it largely comes down to this. The search for Norse voyagers in North America is primarily the purview of amateurs and kooks who claim to have turned up Viking runes and ruins all along the Eastern Seaboard. None of these sites, however, with the sole exception of the Norse settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, has been accepted by the archaeological community. Continue reading →
It’s one of the pitfalls of science journalism: Assigned a story, we rush madly off, interviewing scientists galore, gathering mountains of eclectic facts we’re sure our readers will love. Alas, it’s often impossible to cram all these facts on the printed page, because magazines have space constraints. C’est la vie. But hey, this is the blogosphere, where lost facts come to life again.
So here are some of the odd stories that I unearthed when researching The 12 Dirtiest Fruits and Vegetables, published in the August 2010 issue of Prevention magazine. The feature describes the Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, produced by the Environmental Working Group. The Guide lists a “dirty dozen” of 12 fruits and vegetables with the highest pesticide residues (as determined by U.S. Department of Agriculture tests) and a “clean 15” of less-contaminated produce. (In fact, many of the items on the “clean 15” list are heavily sprayed, but are peeled before they are tested or eaten, so residues are lower.) Weird fruit-and-veggie facts follow:
