“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we Black people had little cargo of our own?” — Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician, in conversation with Jared Diamond. “Cargo” here refers to inventions and manufactured goods. When Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of […]
Barry Evans
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Cancer and Me
“Congratulations!” “Er, thanks — what for?” “For beating cancer!” Congratulations are certainly due but not to me. I was just the patient; all I had to do was be on time for my many medical appointments, follow my oncologist’s instructions and avoid crowds following my chemo infusions while my immune system was recovering. The real […]
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From the Occult to Modern Science
Today, science is so well established as the path to knowledge via observation, experimentation and the weighing of evidence that it’s hard to credit its roots in the occult alchemy and astrology of times past. But just a few hundred years ago, many of the pioneers of modern science — figures such as Isaac Newton, […]
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Year End Potpourri
Mazda: I drive a 1990 Mazda Miata, whose reliability and near-perfect 50/50 weight distribution between the front and rear axles give me hope that it will “see me through,” to borrow a phrase from my late father-in-law. Why “Mazda?” In 1931, cork manufacture Toyo Kogyo was looking for a new company name to celebrate the […]
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Will Returning to the Moon Prepare Us for Mars?
“If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we put a man on the moon?” goes the old joke. Fact is, we probably can put someone on the moon but without the threat of Russia getting there first (as was the case in the 1960s), the motivation just isn’t there anymore. Today, […]
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Subway Maps
“Beck introduced the idea of abandoning geography entirely in order to present the ever-expanding underground network as a circuit diagram.” — Scott Christianson, 100 Diagrams that Changed the World Here’s a tiny version of the BART map that you’ll probably use when you travel around the Bay Area. Note that it’s far from geographically accurate […]
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Cosmic Distances
Looking up and around during the day, it’s easy to understand why the ancients believed that we live under a great dome of sky. Extrapolating to the night sky with the stars apparently rotating overhead, the sixth century Greek philosopher Anaximenes may have been the first to imagine that we live under a vast, rotating […]
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Our Late Neanderthal Cousins
“Some Neanderthal populations died out, some got massacred, some interacted [with humans] and some only exchanged ideas.” — Sang-Hee Lee, biological anthropologist at the University of California. What caused our hominid cousins, the Neanderthals, to die out some 36,000 years ago? Ever since the first skeleton was discovered by quarrymen in Germany’s Neander Valley in […]
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Plenty o’ Nuttin’
“A physicist’s speculations do not morph, as if by cosmological alchemy or professional courtesy, from metaphysics into established physics.” — Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host of PBS’ Closer to Truth series Why is there something rather than nothing? A flurry of new scientific papers has recently appeared in response to this decades-old question. “Scientific” here means […]
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The Cost of Loneliness
“Our [Stone Age] brains evolved to prioritize togetherness, and conversely to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it.” — Matthew Shaer, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 1, 2024 Two years ago, the Journal of the American Heart Association published a study 40 years in the making that quantified the mental and physical […]
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The Not-So Incredible Shrinking Brain
“The brain is a 3-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe 100 billion light-years across.” Marian Diamond, neuroscientist In 2021, a peer-reviewed scientific study made headlines in the popular press: Human brains shrunk by about 5 percent between 5,000 and 3,000 years ago. Taken at face value, this […]
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Woolly Mammoths: The Lady’s Not for Cloning
When I asked self-styled “museum artist” Beth Zaiken if I could use her evocative painting of a mammoth for a story, she was quick to point out that the image I attached was not just a mammoth, it was a woolly mammoth. Turns out, mammoths came in many shapes and sizes, with woolly mammoths particularly celebrated over […]