Ball lightning had been anecdotally described, but has now been created in the lab.
Ball lightning has mystified electricity researchers since Benjamin Franklin first flew his kite in 1752. The very next year, Russian scientist Georg Richmann was killed by ball lightning while flying a kite modeled on Franklin’s experiment.
Since then, dozens of hypotheses have been […]
The Bush Administration’s attempts to establish a theocracy have been as well managed as just about anything else they have tried. How about this one?
Grand Canyon National Park is not permitted to give an official estimate of the geologic age of its principal feature, due to pressure from Bush administration appointees.
What is this all […]
One of my favorite books is “The Genius of the People”, a book about writing the Constitution. The genius of the people was not on display when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments about global warming.
“I mean,” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, “when is the predicted cataclysm?”
Scalia was one of several justices to remark on a […]
Garry Wills gets it going early and keeps it going.
The right wing in America likes to think that the United States government was, at its inception, highly religious, specifically highly Christian, and even more specifically highly biblical. That was not true of that government or any later government?until 2000, when the fiction of the past […]
Will Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims has a new computer game. The game is called Spore. It was demonstrated recently by Wright and the musician and artist, Brian Eno. The article talks about the evolution of computer games. Here’s the wrapup.
It occurred to me as I wandered through […]
The New York Times Sunday Magazine has a great article about elephants. The article talks about the connections between trauma and development, humans and elephants.
Though most scientific knowledge of trauma is still understood through research on human subjects, neural studies of elephants are now under way. (The first functional M.R.I. scan of an elephant […]
From Cosmic Variance:
The great accomplishment of late-twentieth-century cosmology was putting together a complete inventory of the universe. We can tell a story that fits all the known data, in which ordinary matter (every particle ever detected in any experiment) constitutes only about 5% of the energy of the universe, with 25% being dark matter and […]
The New York Times Magazine has a facinating article about obesity and genes. Scientists have expanded the research to include the genomes of the bacteria that line our guts.
About a year ago, Relman joined with other scientists, including Jeffrey Gordon, to begin to sequence all the genes of the human gut microflora. In early June, […]
200 million light years across
An enormous amoeba-like structure 200 million light-years wide and made up of galaxies and large bubbles of gas is the largest known object in the universe, scientists say.The galaxies and gas bubbles, called Lyman alpha blobs, are aligned along three curvy filaments that formed about 2 billion years after the universe […]
Being a good Christian, President Bush sees no need to tell the truth. He has stated repeatedly that “the jury is still out on global warming”. Feh.
In the thin, cold air here atop the Andes mountains, the blue ice that has claimed these peaks for thousands of years and loyally fed the streams […]