Say it quickly — “30-meter telescope” — and it doesn’t sound like much. But this new $2 billion instrument under construction near the summit of Mauna Kea on Hawai’i’s Big Island is a monster. Compare, for instance, the current record holder for optical telescopes, the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Canarias (located on Spain’s Canary Islands) which […]
Barry Evans
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Connections Quiz
Short attention span? Perfect, we understand each other. Each of these “connections” will take no more than 18 seconds to read. That’s supposed to be the average duration of our short-term memories — good for copying down a phone number, hopeless (in my case) for remembering the name of someone I’ve just been introduced to. […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Fighting Entropy
In Part 1, I discussed how entropy can be thought of as a measure of disorder, where chaos and order correspond to high and low entropy, respectively. Let’s see how this works with our bodies, that is, how we stay alive. Compared to the air that surrounds us, our bodies and brains are highly organized, […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Fighting Entropy
Life’s tough, then you die,” proclaims that helpful bumper sticker. Then look at what happens: Entropy takes over. Actually, the entire course of our bodies’ existence, from birth to death, is spent in a nonstop battle to maintain low entropy. The moment we die, entropy starts increasing as the body’s organization gives way to decay. […]
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Excellent Simulations
Suppose this whole mess is just a simulation? Wildfires, Trump, Mars rovers, vaping, dreams, sex, God, you, me, everything — all a digital creation of some far-in-the-future kid playing with her Xbox. You know what teens are like; they get bored easily and destroy what they’ve made before starting over. Max Tegmark, the Swedish-American cosmologist, […]
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Early Routes Out of Humboldt
If you drive or cycle the rolling mountain road from Bridgeville to Kneeland — it’s a county right-of-way, despite all the “no trespassing” signs — you’ll be following the first wagon route out of Humboldt to the south. Today, of course, we effortlessly zip along U.S. Highway 101, mostly along the South Fork of the […]
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Vlad, Vampires and Dracula
Don’t think it’s easy being a vampire. Apart from the mundane sunlight/holy wafer/cross-in-your-face/spike-through-your-heart issues, you’ve got to deal with the fact that blood is toxic. A few teaspoons won’t hurt — blood pudding is a delicacy for Brits, as is seal blood for the Inuit — but start drinking pints of the stuff (like real […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Roots of Homeopathy
Sometimes topics for this column fall, unbidden, into my lap. Such was the case during our recent trip to Romania, where we’d booked a room in the heart of old Sibiu on Strada Samuel Brukenthal. The name rang a bell for me, not because of Brukenthal’s 13-year stint as governor of Transylvania — thanks to […]
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TESS the Planet Hunter
Last time, we discussed how NASA’s recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will spend the next two years surveying nearly the entire sky to search for planets orbiting nearby stars, up to about 100 light years distant. TESS’s four wide-field cameras will spend a month at a time staring at swaths of the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
TESS the Planet Hunter
Sitting in the cavernous nose of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s TESS was launched on April 18 from Cape Canaveral. By the time you read this, TESS —Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite — will be starting its initial two-year, all-sky survey. TESS’s mission is to detect planets orbiting comparatively nearby stars in our Milky Way […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Correlation ≠ Causation
Mention just about any scientific finding involving a chain of causation — anthropocentric global warming, monarch butterflies/milkweed destruction, fluoridation/fewer cavities (“Colorado Brown Stain,” May 31) — and you’ll hear “correlation isn’t causation” from skeptics. And they’re right. If you suggest A causes B, they’re going to ask, “How are you so sure B doesn’t cause […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Colorado Brown Stain and Fluoridation
It reads like the sort of detective yarn beloved by BBC viewers, except that instead of the one-hour format, this story took nearly 50 years to unravel. Chapter one began in 1901, when young East Coast dental school graduate Frederick McKay moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, and was shocked by the prevalence of what became […]