When
a star swallows a planet: it gets hotter and spins faster, and picks up extra
lithium. A common event, apparently.
When
a star swallows a planet: it gets hotter and spins faster, and picks up extra
lithium. A common event, apparently.
A little not-so-gentle satire:
God hates figs.
A good review
and summary of
homosexual
behavior in non-human animals, a subject that has been mostly
ignored in textbooks, although the research has been out there
for decades. The article points out reasons scientists have ignored
the question, other than simple prejudice. A major one is that they
can't explain why it's happening ("it feels good" apparently isn't
a valid explanation in evolutionary biology). Sometimes, the problem
is that zoo-keepers have to guess the sex of the birds in their zoos.
In both cases, researchers see what
they're looking for, namely heterosexual activity: if two birds are
mating, the assumption is that they're of different sexes, and
researchers who are looking for adaptive behavior will ignore or
explain away things that don't fit that model. This article is
a pointer to a new book on
the subject, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality
and Natural Diversity, by Bruce Bagemihl.
A Greenpeace
expedition
to the Arctic has found that the ice on the Chukchi Sea is
melting more rapidly than expected. This is bad news for walruses,
polar bears, guillemots, and other Arctic animals--and maybe for
the rest of us, because water reflects less heat than ice, so
a reduction in the ice cover could lead to further warming, which
would further reduce the ice cover...in a process that might
end only when all the ice was gone.
A National
Geographic article weaves the story of Wei Jingsheng into a
history
of writing,
including the politics of different alphabets and speculations on
the future.
It's a good
day: I tried a new food.
Quenepa, or
Spanish lime, is a tropical fruit that's been turning up on fruit
stands in midtown Manhattan lately. You peel off the green skin
and eat the pale, juicy pulp. My first reaction was "too sour,"
but I wound up licking the juice off my fingers; I may have to
try again and see if I can figure out how to tell which quenepas
are sweet.
This has little to do with the Web, of course--but nobody spends all their time online.
Mark Kingwell
discusses the
pleasures
of identifiable risk and the disappointment that can be
engendered by the news that things we were worried about are
safe after all.
Researchers
who were manipulating genes to study appetite have accidentally created
narcoleptic
mice, and hope this will lead to a better understanding, and
treatment, of narcolepsy in humans.
Tea is
good for your heart--but
chocolate
is even better. As usual with these things, moderation is the
watchword: have a cup of tea and a chocolate cookie, not a gallon
of tea and a whole layer cake.
Survivors
of the Hiroshima bombing, and other anti-nuclear activists, are
protesting
the
sale of earrings shaped like the bomb.
A spokesman for the US National Atomic Museum, which is selling
them, says the earrings
commemorate the work of American scientists. Okay, ten of ten
for historical accuracy, but no points for common decency.
Personally, on August 6 I always feel like giving thanks for the fact that we haven't blown the planet up, after decades of that dubious capability.
If you're
worried about dangerous E. coli. bacteria in apple
juice,
just
add cinnamon! It doesn't work as well on ground meat, but
few modern Americans want cinnamon burgers anyhow.
Your language
needs you! The Oxford English Dictionary is being
revised and, once again, has put out a
call for help:
readers are asked to supply illustrative quotations for English
words, especially those not found in the previous edition.
New words are welcome, as are old words that had been overlooked.
New
claims
of life on Mars. This comes from the researchers who
announced Martian fossils in meteorite ALH84001, back in 1996; they've
looked at more Martian meteorites and found what they say is
further evidence of life. I doubt they promised press conference
will change anyone's mind:
believers will be pleased, skeptics probably unconvinced.
Duct tape holds
the universe together.
A
survey article on
endocrine
disruptors summarizes current research on the effects of a wide
variety of chemicals, including the extent to which these chemicals
linger in the human body, reasons to worry, and a few signs of hope.
An arbitration panel
has set
the
value of the Zapruder film
at $16 million dollars. That's for the physical object, which the US
government claimed for the National Archives under the laws of eminent
domain--Zapruder's family retains the copyright.
Yeats's poem
"The Second
Coming" has been the source of many book titles--this site
returns the favor.
It had to
happen:
Symantec's
Website was hacked.
Symantec is assuring
everyone that only
the Website was affected, despite the hackers' claim that they'd
put a virus on the company's servers.
Racial
stereotypes--and
the expectation of being judged based on them--hurt
black college students' achievement.
The good news is, the authors haven't just identified the problem,
they have solutions: for example, when they made it clear that a
student's grades wouldn't be used to judge blacks as a group,
the grades improved.
Conservation
should be about more than biodiversity: the
Everglades
are worth saving as a unique ecosystem, despite their low
biodiversity.
The
Five
Ball of Magick is just the thing if the Magic 8-Ball is too mundane for
your tastes.
What
if they decided to re-create
Altamont
instead of Woodstock?
Copyright 1999 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.