WHY ANIMALS LINK UP
HUMANS AND some other mammals practice social monogamy; one guy, one gal, more or less for life. Researchers have done lots of work seeking clues about the evolutionary benefits of … Continue reading
ADAPTIVE OPTICS FROM THE PERSEIDS
ASTRONOMERS CAN benefit from air pollution—provided it’s cleverly exploited in what’s called “adaptive optics.” The topic is most appropriate at this time, as we’re at the high point of the … Continue reading
AFOOT WITH ARCHEOLOGY
SHERLOCK HOLMES was a master at identifying what his chronicler Dr. John H. Watson preferred to call “footsteps.” And, according to Science magazine, 26 July 2013, the San people of … Continue reading
RISKY RESEARCH
HOW MUCH risk should a journal assume when publishing new—and potentially contentious—findings? This may sound purely academic, but there are implications in how the rest of us accept things that … Continue reading
LISTENING TO VINYL
ARE YOU back into vinyl yet? Or were you ever into vinyl? B.C.D., Before Compact Discs, the vibrations of sound that we call music were shared by a wiggly spiral … Continue reading
OWLS HEAD TRANSPORTATION MUSEUM
WHAT A perfect time to visit Owls Head, Maine, and its Transportation Museum (http://www.ohtm.org)! The museum offers a real variety for enthusiasts of motion, with 50 cars, 28 aircraft, 14 bicycles, … Continue reading
SCIENCE TIME TRAVEL
SUPPOSE YOU could travel back in time and share some 21st Century knowledge with someone of an earlier era. Whom to choose? What knowledge to share? In its “NextGenVoices,” 5 … Continue reading
WHALE TALES
I DISLIKE multi-tasking but confess what follows is simultaneously a book review, a favored research activity and a technological report. Christopher Moore’s book Fluke is a tale of whimsy, fantasty … Continue reading
GAMING NOISE
“I WON! I won!” Or maybe not. Artfully engineered responses from games—and gambling hardware—are designed to encourage continued play through what researchers call “losses disguised as wins.” This concept is … Continue reading
ONLINE HOOKUPS
I SPEAK here of hookups in the more permanent sense of the M-word—of marriage. A recent report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, June 3, 2013, proposes … Continue reading
