Life + Outdoors

After only 13 years of nuclear power generation, PG&E shut down the Humboldt Bay nuclear reactor in 1976 due to seismic concerns. Two years ago, contractors at the site loaded five dry storage casks (photo) with the remaining hot (radioactive) spent fuel rods. “Dry” here means the rods are surrounded by inert helium gas, as […]

You don’t have to be from Brooklyn to know, and probably use, many Yiddish words, most of which sound much more colorful than their English equivalents. Schmoozing sounds just like what it is, while schlepping a heavy suitcase through the airport is so much more evocative than plain old “hauling.” Do your workmates complain a […]

Since their introduction nearly 30 years ago, compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) have made slow but sure progress in replacing incandescent tungsten light bulbs, which are essentially unchanged since Edison started selling them in 1879. Incandescents will soon be the dinosaurs of the lighting industry because they’re so inefficient, losing 98 percent of their energy input […]

Does our native language affect the way we experience reality? This question has been debated for the last 70 years, since Benjamin Lee Whorf — fire inspector by day, linguistics researcher and anthropology lecturer by night — published an article in which he proposed (among much else) that since the Hopi language has no way […]

A four foot-by-two foot-by-one foot chunk of dark-grey granite is the most visited object in London’s venerable British Museum. The Rosetta Stone, which has been on display there almost continuously since 1802, was discovered by a French soldier in the wall of a 300-year-old fort in Rashid (Rosetta) in northwest Egypt. For centuries, Arabic and […]

In the spring of 1909, Russian photography pioneer Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky got the break of his life when he was invited to show his latest images to Tsar Nicholas II and family. What had caught the tsar’s eye was a color photograph of aging novelist Leo Tolstoy taken by Prokudin-Gorsky the previous year. For Prokudin-Gorsky, […]

Pablo Picasso, the story goes, was traveling by train in Spain when a fellow passenger recognized him. “Why don’t you paint people as they actually are?” Picasso asked him what he meant. “Well, people are nothing like how you show them. For instance” — the man pulled a small photo from his wallet — “this […]

When a species gets down to a few hundred individuals, it is considered endangered. This was the case with our own species, Homo sapiens, whose numbers fell precipitously around 150,000-130,000 years ago, during the peak of one of the severest ice ages, the “Marine Isotope Stage 6.” At that time, our ancestors all lived in […]