Absentee Gardening and Lucky Weather

One of the advantages of living in an area with a warm dry climate is the long growing season. I normally start my vegetable garden with seeds and seedlings in the last week of March, and finish harvesting peppers and tomatoes around Thanksgiving. This year, though, March flew by before I knew it. That actually turned out to be a stroke of luck, because...

May 2015

Ant Talk

When a wood thrush flew by the Trailhead mound carrying a grasshopper to her own nest and dropped part of the crushed insect to the ground, a patrolling worker found it in less than a minute and triggered a chain action. The worker examined the grasshopper, tasted it briefly, then ran back to the nest entrance. On the way, she touched the tip of...

May 2015

Equal Pay Day: Why don't women just ask for more?

Today is Equal Pay Day. It's not a celebration like Mother's Day or Independence Day or Labor Day, at least for half the US population.  Instead April 12th symbolizes how far into 2011 women must work to earn what men earned in 2010 - it's not an exact date because the 2010 earnings data has not yet been released. If you take a look at the US labor...

May 2015

We're Not Evolved for Typing Email

Our bodies did not evolve to sit at a desk on a rigid position all day. Our fingers are not designed to move independently. We are graspers, we are killers, our bodies evolved to do particular things. More about Gmail Motion. (I totally want this for real - I could use some increased physical activity as I email)

May 2015

A Sense of Wonder and Awesome Slime Molds

I've never understood the claim that science somehow detracts from the beauty of the natural world. I think xkcd sums it up the sense of wonder scientists get with a new discovery pretty nicely: The sense of wonder at a new scientific discovery is similar to but not identical with the "sensawunda" you can get reading science fiction. It's an excitement...

May 2015

March Showers, Spring Flowers: The Gold

Yesterday I posted about the variety of blue and purple wildflowers that have sprung up after the recent rains.  But while the lupines and bellflowers and blue dicks provide spots of color, it was the yellow flowers that brightened the hillsides on an otherwise gloomy evening. (Click to enlarge images) Almost two years ago a fire swept across the hills...

May 2015

March Showers, Spring Flowers: The Blues

I love spring rain.  It makes the air fresh, the weather cool and after a day of sunshine brings a profusion of yellow and blue and purple flowers. Admittedly I consider most of those flowers weeds when they appear in my garden. But they look lovely on the local hillsides and add color to the less-well-tended bits of pavement around town. Yesterday...

May 2015

Harvard Lectures: The Science of Cooking and Molecular Gastronomy

The Science and Cooking Public Lectures were a popular series of lectures presented through the Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences last fall. Now it's available online for everyone to watch*. The introductory lecture features Harold McGee (author of On Food and Cooking), who talks about the history of using science in cooking...

May 2015

Ant vision and other animal superpowers

Imagine you were an ant, crawling through the grass.  You would have a view of your surroundings invisible to the people towering above you. Or imagine you are a bird, using your ability to sense Earth's magnetic field to migrate halfway around the world. Interactive media designers and artists Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada collaborated to provide...

May 2015

Fishy Skin Treatment

This may be TMI, but the wintry weather we've been having has made my feet really dry and itchy (and not too pretty to look at). Soaking my feet in a warm bath brought to mind a story I read a few years ago about pedicures that used fish to nibble away dead skin. The fish turns out to be the Garra rufa or Doctor Fish. Native to Turkey, Iraq, Iran...

May 2015