17 May 2009
When British soldiers arrived in Jamestown in 1676 to quell a Colonial rebellion, a few daring farmers slipped some jimson weed into the British chow. The soldiers hallucinated for 11 days. “One would blow up a feather in the air,” writes a historian, “another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey.” From The good, the bad, and the deadly of plants, a May 17 science column in the Sunday Globe.
19 April 2009
The Milky Way belongs to a cluster of galaxies (we call it the Local Group), which in turn belongs to a vast conglomerate of tens of thousands of galaxies (the Virgo supercluster). Spiral-shaped, ellipse-shaped, sombrero-shaped – in the visible universe, at any given moment, there are hundreds of thousands of millions of galaxies. Maybe as many as 140 billion. All those galaxies, stuffed with all those stars, stuffed with how many worlds? If our sun is one in 10 sextillion, could our Earth be one in 10 sextillion as well? Or the Earth might be one – the only one, the one An outtake from We’re at the center of the universe – unless we’re not, an April 19 column in the Sunday Globe.
18 January 2009
One can only hope, however naively, that in another 200 years, Darwin’s theory of natural selection will have ceased to be so controversial. Two centuries from now we may understand exactly how life originated on Earth. We may be synthesizing new kinds of life in laboratories. We may have even detected it on a distant planet. From Evolutionary Road, a January 18 column in the Sunday Globe.
16 November 2008
Morton points out that phrases like ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’ brutally simplify what human inputs have done to the global atmosphere over the past two centuries. As utilitarian as phrases like these seem, to call what’s going on in Earth’s atmosphere ‘climate change’ is akin to calling what’s going on in global markets, ‘financial change.’ An outtake from Overlooked Agents of Change, a November 16 column in the Sunday Globe.
22 September 2008
The most prominent and mystifying of Brooks’s 13 anomalies are the twin riddles of dark energy and dark matter. These enigmas account for 96 percent of the mass in the observable universe, yet their existence remains inferred and hypothetical. Some of our smartest cosmologists have invested two decades in figuring out dark matter, but we still don’t know what it is. From Conundrums and Curiosities, a September 21 column in the Sunday Globe.
23 August 2008
E. coli, Zimmer shows us, have sex, make chemical weapons, wage wars, get old, deceive one another, and even “build microbial cities.” They can make heat-shock proteins to protect their colonies when they get too warm; they can maintain a sense of direction; they can even communicate with other members of their species. What we think of as infinitesimal and primitive, Zimmer reminds us, is often totally remarkable and intensely complicated. From Our bacteria, ourselves: appreciating E. coli, an August 17 column in the Sunday Globe.
20 July 2008
Yank all the starfish off a sea stack in coastal Washington, and within months the mussels that the starfish would normally eat form a diversity-crushing monopoly. Take sea otters out of the ocean around an Aleutian island, and the sea urchins the otters would normally eat mow nearby kelp forests into oblivion. Remove cougars from the Eastern Seaboard, and white-tailed deer lay waste to forests. Take wolves out of Yellowstone, and elk decimate the cottonwood, willow, and aspen seedlings. From Paradises Wounded, but not lost, a July 20 column in the Sunday Globe.
16 March 2008
The implication was that big-brained Homo sapiens, perched at the top of the topmost twig, formed the pinnacle of evolution. This is a fallacy. Evolution proceeds by blind chance, not by design. We are adapted creatures, but we are not optimized creatures. As counterintuitive as it might seem, it’s inaccurate to suggest that humans are more evolved than, say, horseshoe crabs, which have been living and dying for 400 million years
From All Creatures, Great and Overrated, a March 16 column in the Sunday Globe.
20 January 2008
Ultimately, Maeterlinck writes with the same intrinsic humility that will be familiar to admirers of John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, or Mary Oliver. His conclusions match Thoreau’s: that we humans are only part of a network of much greater systems, and that we occupy a position in those systems which is located at neither the pinnacle nor the center. His is a post-Copernican, Enlightenment project: to rid our perception of the natural world of its human-centric context.
From reviews of new editions of Maurice Maeterlinck’s The Intelligence of Flowers and Henry David Thoreau’s Excursions in the Jan 20 Sunday Globe.
19 November 2007
History didn’t start with the first humans—they were cavemen! They were pre-history, pre-literacy, pre-everything. Early humans squatted in dusty dioramas and lived short, terrifying lives. The Stone Age wasn’t history; the Stone Age was a preamble to history, a dystopian era of stasis before the happy onset of civilization, and the arrival of nifty developments like chariot wheels, gunpowder, and Google. Right?
From reviews of Matthew Hedman’s The Age of Everything and Daniel Lord Smail’s On Deep History and the Brain in the Nov 18 Sunday Globe.
15 September 2007
So what did the scientific community think when a devoutly Christian paleontologist cracked open the femur of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex and claimed she had found soft, stretchy tissues inside?...
Inquiring Minds and Brains is a review of The Best American Science Writing 2007 from the Globe.
10 July 2007
…Weisman is actually at his best when exploring the past, tracing the world as it was before homo sapiens to extrapolate what it might be like after homo sapiens. He conjures the mammoths and beavers (big as black bears) and sloths (big as cows) of North America in the late Pleistocene; he imagines the ancient, brooding forest that once shrouded Europe from Ireland to Siberia… Did you know that 13 million gallons of water need to be pumped out of New York City’s subway systems every day? Or that ancient underground cities are carved into the volcanic tuff of Cappadocia, Turkey?...
From a review of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us in the July 15 Globe.
20 May 2007
…Any world map shows that the earth’s surface is about 75 percent ocean. But it’s easy to forget that the seas are, on average, 2 1/2 miles deep. On land, animals live on the ground or within about 200 feet of it. In the ocean, animals live at the surface, or at the bottom of the deepest trenches, 6 1/2 miles down. Multiplied out, that means 99 percent of the space inhabitable by the earth’s animals exists in the oceans…
Fathoms Deep, a Diverse, Endangered World discusses the alien and fragile worlds of deep water, as presented in Claire Nouvian’s extraordinary The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss and Tony Koslow’s The Silent Deep: The Discovery, Ecology, and Conservation of the Deep Sea.
20 March 2007
… Try termites. These blind creatures, rarely more than a twelfth of an inch long, routinely construct monumental castles 20 feet tall, replete with staircases, gardens, nurseries, royal chambers, waste dumps, air conditioning systems, and water wells that can sometimes be as deep as 150 feet. How far, the Goulds want to know, does the imagination of a termite extend?...
More Than a Match for Homo Sapiens is a column discussing Animal Architects, by James R. Gould and Carol Grant Gould and The Elephant’s Secret Sense, by Caitlin O’Connell.
27 January 2007
...Modern astrophysics, it turns out, is built mostly on the analysis of spectra of light, much of which is entirely invisible to the naked eye. The universe throbs with the kinds of electromagnetic radiation we need specialized instruments to detect; radio waves radiate from nebulae, X-rays leave dying stars, and microwaves pour out of the chemical forges of the Milky Way…
Saturn’s Vanishing Rings and Other Surprises is a column reviewing Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I write a bimonthly column on science-related books for the Boston Globe. I try to choose well-written, underappreciated titles intended for the lay reader, on topics ranging from cosmology to biology to the environment.
