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Now let’s turn to the present. According to the most recent edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2,448,017 Americans died in 2005. It was one of the country’s worst years for war deaths in decades, with the armed forces embroiled in conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together the two wars killed…
The evidence is not only anecdotal. A recent study by Aaron Clauset, Samuel Arbesman, and Daniel B. Larremore shows that “a quarter of all universities account for 71 to 86 percent of all tenure-track faculty in the U.S. and Canada in these three fields. Just 18 elite universities produce half of all computer science…
Some of the first questions which come up in any practical discussion of space colonization are questions of economics. Suppose we go out and settle on a convenient asteroid with our little spaceship, what do we do when we get there? How do we make a living? What can we expect to export in order to pay for necessary…
The ancestors of modern North American bears evolved in Asia during the Pleistocene, wandering over to Alaska during several appearances of the Bering land bridge, between the Bering and Kamchatka Peninsulas. Advancing and receding glaciers, fueled by evaporating sea water, caused ocean levels to alternately drop and…
This is where the prediction comes in. If there were lobe-finned fishes but no terrestrial vertebrates 390 million years ago, and clearly terrestrial vertebrates 360 million years ago, where would you expect to find the transitional forms? Somewhere in between. Following this logic, Shubin predicted that if…
Scientists are also encouraged by studies on mice with a certain genetic mutation that makes them age prematurely — complete with graying and thinning fur, cataracts, hearing loss, smaller brains, enlarged hearts, anemia and thin and weak muscles — hallmark symptoms of growing older. To test whether it was possible to…
One, two, three ragged files of Canada geese skim the treetops, preceded and followed by their honking chorus. I freeze in my tracks to watch them pass, heading south, feathers ruffled by the last warm breezes of the season. When their honks have faded into silence, I notice a chill in the air. The spinning planet has…
Many plants new to North America first sprouted up alongside wharves and shipyards. From there they made their way inland along new roads hacked out of the wilderness, and later along canals and railroad embankments, taking up residence in any sort of disturbed soil. Native plants adapted to quiet precolonial forests…
No law of physics is more basic than the law of entropy, the tendency of the universe to move toward disorder and death. But life bucks the tide. using available free energy wherever it can get it, and hereabouts the most abundant source of energy is sunlight. The mayflower constructs its tiny oasis of order by…
On an outcrop of volcanic bedrock near the paath sit half a dozen erratic boulders, some weighining as much as twenty tons, of a coarse-grainned pink granite. Once, I chipped off a sample of)f the rock and followed the bedrock scratches northth, looking for the source. Like an Indian trail of bent twigs. le scratches…
A crushing backload, indeed: fiddlehead ferns, downy woodpecker, pickerel, granite flake. Canada mayflower, moonrise, bluebirds, spring peepers, monarch butterflies, glacial scratches on bedrock, and, of course, the human history of my path, which in its transformations over the centuries encapsulates in many…
Donald Fleming of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and colleagues managed to disguise a helium atom as a hydrogen atom byreplacing one of its orbiting electrons with a muon, which is far heavier than an electron. Because it is so heavy, the muon sits 200 times closer to the helium nucleus than…
Your 3-year-old has declared that he and the closet are going to Asia. Asia, like America, is a concept that depends on our ability to think symbolically. America exists only because a group of people got together more than 200 years ago and decided that this great mass of land directly to the south of Canada should…