“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, […]
Field Notes
Posted inLife + Outdoors
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 […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
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 […]
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From Mars Believer to Skeptic, Part 2
Continuing from last week, here’s more on why I think talk of exploring and colonizing Mars is a boondoggle at this stage. Water is going to be a Big Deal. Actually, obtaining liquid water on Mars will be a snap compared to the moon, where it’s been compared to extracting moisture from concrete. But it’s still […]
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From Mars Believer to Skeptic, Part 1
My love affair with Mars goes back decades, when I’d hang out with members of the Mars Underground, a small group of University of Boulder science alumni who ate, talked and slept Mars. Then came the excitement of annual Mars Society meetings, the name of which says it all. More recently, I’ve been speaking and […]
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The Other Evolutionist
The philosopher and gadfly Daniel Dennett, who died in April, wrote that evolution by natural selection was “the single best idea anyone has ever had.” The word “anyone” implies a single idea-monger, although, as I’ve written elsewhere (“Evolution’s Co-Discover,” Nov. 5, 2020), the credit should go equally to two great field naturalists of the 19th […]
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Rise and Fall of the “Sunshine Vitamin,” Part Two
Last week, I outlined the importance of vitamin D for healthy bodies and how recommendations for adequacy published in 2011 were, in retrospect, far too extreme. To understand why vitamin D assumed such a huge role in the health of the nation — vitamin D tests are still the fifth-most-common Medicare-funded lab tests — it’s […]