As we saw last week, Titan’s surface is a tapestry of abundant carbon-rich chemistry, a delicious target for curious Earthlings to explore. The challenges are immense, including temperatures that make Minnesotan winters look positively tropical, a 90-minute-long communication gap with Earth, sand-like dunes ready to bog down wheeled vehicles and surface sunlight one thousandth the […]
Barry Evans
Posted inField Notes
Saturnian Drone: Dragonfly at Titan (Part 1)
“[On early Earth] you need to have gone from simple to complex chemistry before jumping to biology, but we don’t know all the steps. Titan allows us to uncover some of them.”— Zibi Turtle, Dragonfly principal investigator “A bizarre Earth” is how one investigator describes icy Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, and the target of NASA’s most […]
Posted inField Notes
Midsummer Puzzle Time Q’s
TrianglesHow many triangles can you find in this figure? The Old ‘Rope around the Equator” PuzzleYou tie a rope tightly around the Earth’s equator then add three feet to its length and raise it evenly as high as possible. Can a cat now get under the rope? TimepiecesA sundial has no moving parts. What timepiece […]
Posted inField Notes
Sex: Nature’s Greatest Hack
Although I wrote about this topic quite recently (“Why Two Sexes?” Feb. 15, 2024), I’m revisiting it due to increasing interest — and confusion — around gender politics. While one’s gender can be as fluid as our culture is diverse, biological sex isn’t. Eukaryotes like us are born male or female, depending on the size […]
Posted inField Notes
Wallace’s Problem with Evolution
In an ironic turn of history, two of Charles Darwin’s most ardent supporters ended up disagreeing with him. The first was Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle and Darwin’s senior by four years, with whom Darwin had a great relationship during the sloop’s 1831-1836 round-the-world voyage of exploration. At the time, both men hewed […]
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Canals on Mars
“Lowell always said that the regularity of the [Martian] canals was an unmistakable sign that they were of intelligent origin. The only unresolved question was which side of the telescope the intelligence was on.”— Carl Sagan, Cosmos “Canals on the Planet Mars,” read the headline of The Times of London of April 13, 1882, in […]
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Why Isn’t ‘Eleven’ ‘One-teen?
And why isn’t twelve “two-teen”? Why do bagels come in dozens? Why are there two sets of 12 hours in a day? And why 12 inches to the foot? Like much of northern Europe, England once had a hybrid system of counting based on both 10 (decimal) and 12 (duodecimal). Today, almost all our daily […]
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’Twas Brillig
“‘It seems very pretty,’ she said when she had finished it, ‘but it’s rather hard to understand!’” — Alice’s reaction on reading, in mirror writing, “Jabberwocky” in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass ’Twas brillig, and the slithy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabe;All mimsy were the borogoves,And the mome raths outgrabe. So begins […]
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The Five Colors of the Rainbow
“The seven notes of the scale before the return to the octave are analogous to the colors of the rainbow — red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, plus the strangely superfluous indigo which made the number up to seven.” — Ian Bostridge Tenor Ian Bostridge, quoted above, reminds us we are supposed to see […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Monarch Butterflies Part 2: Tracking in Real Time
Last week, I wrote about the bad news: that monarch butterfly populations have been plummeting since the 1980s. The good news is that a revolutionary new tracking device may help those populations recover. Naturalists have been trying to track monarchs for nearly a century, but mass ID-ing (with tiny stick-on tags) only began in large […]
Posted inField Notes
Monarch Butterflies
Part 1: Migration Magic It’s not easy being a monarch butterfly these days. Your caterpillar’s essential milkweed food is no longer abundant; illegal logging and beetle infestations threaten your main winter roosts in Mexico, and climate change is playing havoc with nectar plants on your migration routes. Where hundreds of millions of monarchs roosted annually […]
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In the Beginning
“A good scientific theory is one that allows us to calculate the results of many observations from few assumptions.” — Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder Hossenfelder’s concise statement explains why the Genesis account — Earth and Heavens created out of nothing in six days — has no appeal for scientists looking to understand the cosmos. And why […]