Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
A riff on the counterintuitive problem of black holes.
Archive of posts filed under the science category.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Any day you get to quote Charles Darwin is a good day indeed. (OK, I actually had to paraphrase, but still.) Pity the poor Galapagos tortoise. An icon of evolution, he also apparently makes a nice dinner. When Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos in 1835, he noted that tortoises differed from island to island. It …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Just in from Ethiopia: A team led by a Los Alamos scientist has emerged from the deserts of Ethiopia with new evidence for the evolution of our first upright-walking ancestor 4 million years ago. The bones of Australopithecus anamensis capture a moment in pre-history when our ancestors were emerging from the woods on two legs, …
Climate’s Ebb and Flow
A nice bit of business from Anjali Nayar’s NYTimes profile of Gavin Schmidt: “The climate is like the city,” he said as he gestured at the scene around him. The city is made up of millions of people making individual decisions: when to wake in the morning, what time to go to work, where to …
And More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Blast to Simulate Nuke Explosion (sub. req.): Pentagon researchers plan to set off a simulated nuclear blast in the Nevada desert in June as part of their search for a better way to destroy buried enemy bunkers, according to federal documents. A Defense Nuclear Threat Reduction Agency spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny the nuclear …
Tribalism
Kevin Vranes had a great post yesterday about tribalism in the climate wars. He subtitled it “get over your tribalism instincts already”, which the commenters apparently skipped past in their zeal to read what Kevin had to say. Kevin didn’t rise to Chris Mooney’s bait, so I don’t know if he was obliquely criticizing Mooney …
More Buffelgrass
As a followup to yesterday’s post on bufflegrass, which is ravaging the Sonoran desert, I checked in with my buffelgrass expert on the question I posed about whether bufflegrass has made its way into New Mexico. The answer is that it is not cold-tolerant, so we haven’t seen it here much. But a group of …
Buffelgrass
Apropos last week’s discussions of tamarisk comes this Tucson Weekly story about buffelgrass, an African invader that is playing havoc with the Sonoran desert: In spite of the frantic warnings of ecologists and land managers, and despite some valiant and surprisingly effective local efforts, the problem is now so acute that biologists view buffelgrass as …
The Tamarisk Assumption
It’s a given here in the desert southwest that tamarisk, a tough little red-barked tree that grows along our river banks, is evil. A European immigrant that arrived more than a century ago, it now dominates the banks of our desert streams and rivers, choking out native cottonwoods and sucking up precious water. At least …
Plagues and Stuff
A nice review of Al Zelicoff and Michael Bellomo’s Microbe: Microbe is also a book designed to disrupt our sense of complacency about the public health system in the U.S. It challenges our assumption that the public health system works well, even in the face of widespread disease and even epidemics. The reader encounters example …