Something alien is growing in the community garden on my street. The garden occupies a narrow lot, fenced on all sides and bordered by multi-family homes. There’s a wooden fence in the front; the entrance is always open. In the nearly 30 plots, all of ...
My son Sam is an early riser. For the first 16 months of my his life, give or take a month, the day began in the same way. I’d get up with him at 5:30 or 6 (or, on lucky days, 6:30). I’d turn on the radio, make coffee, eat a bowl of oatmeal, bundle my ...
Broadly speaking, the history of astronomy reads something like the story about how we humans have discovered our insignificance in the cosmos. In the last two thousand years, major discoveries about the solar system, our galaxy and the universe have ...
I am pretty lucky. I am a science writer who, from my home office not too far from Wooster Square, gets to write about topics like giant, gassy planets that would float in a bathtub—if only there existed a bathtub large enough. I recently felt the Nerd’ ...
In English, a regular verb is one whose past tense ends in “ed,” like helped. The past tense of an irregular verb, though, follows no easy rule: Consider got or bought. Now for frustrated English-language students everywhere, there is good news: A ...
Between YouTube videos, your processor can search for a cure for AIDS.02.06.2008 Hi-res, hi-tech imaging can peer inside meteorites, cavemen, and cell phones.02.05.2008 An intrepid food expert plays astronaut to find out. 02.01.2008 The global warming ...
Some so-called fish stories turn out to be the real thing. In February, New Zealand fishermen plying the waters of the Ross Sea near Antarctica hauled up a real live sea monster in the very act of devouring an Antarctic toothfish. Remains in the ...
A team of biomedical engineers and materials scientists at Northwestern University have invented a glue that behaves like the adhesive on a Post-it note, with the advantage that it also works on wet surfaces. Once out of the lab, it may drive the ...
Two British researchers challenged the conventional history of mathematics in June when they reported having evidence that the infinite series, one of the core concepts of calculus, was first developed by Indian mathematicians in the 14th century. They ...
Chinese researchers announced(pdf) in March that they had created glass that can be bent into right angles without shattering. But this isn’t glass as we know it: The new glass is opaque, twice as strong as window glass, and made of metal. As solids, ...
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