(September 12, 2019)
Observant walkers strolling down Ninth Street in Eureka between A and L streets may have wondered about the occasional incongruent circular metal discs anchored into the south sidewalk bearing the...
(August 29, 2019)
"It may be tough to convince patients, even those with an incurable disease, that the best approach is not to kill as many cancer cells as possible but as few...
(August 15, 2019)
"Water, water everywhere/Nor any drop to drink." Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ancient mariner was plagued by the same predicament as many people today who live near the ocean: They're short of...
(August 1, 2019)
We are in the middle of another space race, according to Vice President Mike Pence, "just as we were in the 1960s." No, not with those Sputnik-launching Ruskies this time....
(July 18, 2019)
"... this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon ... No single space project in this period...
(July 4, 2019)
The Old Bridge Four people with one flashlight between them have to cross a rickety two-person capacity bridge in the next 17 minutes before a hurricane destroys it: Alice...
(June 20, 2019)
The only proven method for curbing population growth is to eradicate extreme poverty and give people better lives, including education and contraceptives. — Hans Rosling, Factfulness Quick quiz to get...
(June 6, 2019)
Last week, we looked at the difference between "terraforming-lite," warming Mars to the point where it has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and liquid water oceans, and "full terraforming," where...
(May 30, 2019)
Say the word quickly and it doesn't sound that difficult. We know how to warm Earth (unfortunately) so it shouldn't take much to warm much smaller Mars. After that, it's...
(May 16, 2019)
Cosmology is essentially a whodunnit but, unlike your typical 600-page detective yarn, this story doesn't unfold clue by clue until the denouement in last few pages. The puzzle — basically,...
(May 2, 2019)
It's a conundrum: Ultraviolet B radiation from the sun is both the best source of vitamin D — the "sunshine vitamin" — and the the major cause of skin cancer....
(April 11, 2019)
Last week, we looked at anthropologist Jared Diamond's claim that the Neolithic Revolution, when most hunter-gatherers settled down to become farmers, was "the worst mistake in the history of the...
(April 4, 2019)
The downturn in human nutrition began long before Ray Kroc brought Big Macs to the masses, Coca Cola conned developing countries into buying their addictive sugary concoctions and Nestlé...
(March 21, 2019)
We're spatial creatures. We live in a three-dimensional world, with our fourth "dimension" — time — conceptualized in terms of space. That is, we refer to time as if it...
(March 6, 2019)
Celtic is virtually absent in the English language, despite the fact that almost everyone in what is now England spoke a branch of Celtic before Germanic speakers invaded the country...
(February 21, 2019)
Quick quiz: Would you rather receive $100 right now or $120 a month from now? Most people take the $100 right now, despite the extraordinary offer of 20 percent...
