Ingenuity, “Ginny” to its friends, will never fly again. The little Mars-based helicopter-drone landed badly on its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, damaging all four of its carbon fiber wingtips and ruling out future flights. But in the three years since being released from the underbelly of its “mothership” the Mars rover Perseverance, it […]
Barry Evans
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Multiverse
“… at a time when our world, the real world, faces serious problems, [scientists] dwelling on multiverses strikes me as escapism — akin to billionaires fantasizing about colonizing Mars.” John Horgan There are two categories of multiverses, conveniently labeled “landscapes” and “dreamscapes” by physics professor Paul Halpern in his new book The Allure of the […]
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Why Two Sexes?
“The biological definition of sex wasn’t designed to ensure fair sporting competition, or to settle disputes about access to healthcare.” — Paul Griffiths, professor of Philosophy of Biology, University of Sydney With the current debate about gender identity, particularly with regard to the rights and welfare of transgender people, this seems an appropriate time to […]
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A Not So Boring 2024
At first blush, the number of the year we’re living in, 2024, sounds pretty uninteresting. First off, it’s obviously not prime (a prime number being only divisible by 1 and itself), unlike, for instance, prime years 2017 and 2027. I like prime years for their individuality. Same with my age: Two years ago, 79 was […]
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Cosmic Crisis
There are crises and crises, and unless you’re an avid science buff, you may not realize that cosmologists — the few thousand researchers whose lives are dedicated to understanding the history of the universe from birth to death — are currently faced with a huge predicament that’s only getting worse. It’s to do with the […]
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The Awesome Dumbbell Nebula
Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French comet hunter. Today, scattered around the globe, hundreds of amateur astronomers follow his lead every night, each striving to be the first to discover a fuzzy, luminous patch that (a) turns out to be moving against the background stars, that is, a comet; and (b) is subsequently named after […]
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Putin Moments
A year ago, lying in bed at 3 a.m., I had what I think of as my “Putin Moment”: I couldn’t remember the name of the Russian president. Not that I’m a hypochondriac but I asked my physician the next time I saw her if she thought this might the start of cognitive decline, along […]
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Light Pollution
“The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow of the nearest strip mall depresses me no end.” Sönke Johnson, Ecologist at Duke University Are you appreciating the Milky Way these winter evenings? Beyond your dark-accustomed eyes, you […]
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Entropy and Order
“You can find many different diagnoses in death certificates, but they’re just details. What really kills us is entropy increase.” — Sabine Hossenfelder, Existential Physics Along with the Big Bang, entropy is probably the most cited and misunderstood concept in popular physics. It usually goes something like this: Everything tends to a state of disorder, […]
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Rocket Science
If you’ve ever watched the launch of a rocket, perhaps a Space Shuttle or one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9s, you’ll have heard the phrase “Max Q.” About a minute after launch — one minute 22 seconds, in the case of Falcon 9 — the announcer will say something like, “The spacecraft is now experiencing its […]
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Humboldt Bay Timeline
Humboldt Bay (Wigi, to the Wiyot people) is actually a lagoon, the largest protected large body of water between San Francisco and Puget Sound. It’s about 14 miles long and varies in width between a few hundred yards and 5 miles, with an area between 11 (low tide) and 24 (high tide) square miles. What […]
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Darwin’s Bulldog
“I was the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours.” — T.H. Huxley, following his debate with Bishop Wilberforce At 25, Thomas Henry Huxley returned from a four-year stint in the Royal Navy — he was assistant surgeon on a Royal Navy corvette exploring the South Seas from 1846 to 1850 […]