“It’s a wild ride. It’s completely unlikely and should not be taken as a model for how scientific discovery ever happens. It’s completely ridiculous.” — Craig Kaplan, co-author of the recent paper on aperiodic monotiles Sometimes, from the simplest of beginnings, emerge whole worlds of complexity. Einstein’s general relativity can be expressed in a compact […]
Barry Evans
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To Run is Human
“In the ancient Olympics, nobody competed with shoes, you would run barefoot.” — Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist Forget the invention of sex, fire, toolmaking, language, agriculture. The real turning point in the four-billion-year saga from the origin of life on Earth to bacon-flavored dental floss occurred 7 million years ago, a blink of a geological eye. That’s […]
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Vulcan: Missing in Action
Vulcan was the Roman god of fire; he was also ugly. The good news is that he somehow got to marry the goddess Venus, who was something of a catch. The bad news is she was constantly unfaithful. Although sounding like a bit of a loser, Vulcan had the last laugh, giving us our word […]
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Aliens vs. Alien Life
Aliens: Intelligent creatures from a distant star who have traveled to Earth. Alien Life: A necessary precursor to those aliens, simple self-replicating molecules, such as cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Earth is one of eight planets with an assortment of smaller bodies in thrall to our star, the Sun. The Sun is one of about a third […]
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Drones in Rwanda
“You now see much bigger and wealthier countries like the U.S. using Rwanda as a role model.” A surprising statement given that Rwanda, a landlocked country in the heart of Africa with a land area twice that of Humboldt County, was the scene of a brutal massacre 29 years ago: 1 million dead in 100 […]
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Humboldt’s Lagoons
Of the four lagoons claimed by Humboldt Lagoons State Park, only two would pass muster with any self-respecting dictionary. A lagoon is usually defined as a shallow body of brackish water separated from the ocean by a shoal, having a regular source of fresh water. Big Lagoon and Stone Lagoon (the latter being Chah-pekw O’ […]
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Multi-messenger Astronomy and Gold Rings
Astronomers glean information about distant objects from four types of energetic signals: electromagnetic radiation (such as visible light, radio waves and gamma waves); gravitational waves (subtle “ripples’ in spacetime, first detected in 2015); neutrinos (electrically neutral elementary particles having almost no mass); and cosmic rays (high energy particles, mostly protons, that, like neutrinos, travel at […]
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Lava Beds, Lava Tubes, Modoc War
A geological hotspot deep underground in the northeast corner of California has been sending molten rock to the surface for over half a million years. It’s a reminder that we live out our brief lives on a geologically active planet that counts the passing of time in millennia, not months and years. Medicine Lake volcano, situated […]
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Table Bluff Cemetery
Seeing today’s sparse scattering of a few homes and farm buildings, Table Bluff’s two cemeteries — one Catholic, one “Other” — might seem like overkill. But the Table Bluff community was once a going concern, a lively stage and wagon stop atop the ridge for which it’s named. Raluaka, its Wiyot name, is a gnarly […]
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The Rosetta Stone
When Napoleon Bonaparte set his sights on clearing the British out of Egypt in 1798, he took with him 160 savants in his 400-ship invasion fleet. These worthies were scientists, artists and historians who, supposedly, would bring the lost civilization of the Egyptian pharaohs to light, thus ensuring Napoleon’s legacy not only as a conqueror, […]
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The Island Yacht Club
Following the “shocking and revolting,” in Bret Harte’s words, massacre at the Wiyot village on the former Indian Island, now Tuluwat, in February of 1860, the few survivors were removed to, or sought refuge at, Fort Humboldt. They were subsequently relocated to the Smith River and Klamath reservations, while German immigrant Robert Gunther, then 29, […]
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The Covered Bridges of Humboldt County
If you’ve flown anywhere in the last few years, you probably — unwittingly — walked through a covered bridge, what airlines call a “jetbridge,” the moveable corridor that links the terminal with the plane. We don’t usually think of a jetbridge as a covered bridge, of course — that’s reserved for those lovely single-lane timber […]