Category: Ionian Enchantment

Came across this enchanting Alfred Russel Wallace quote while watching Attenborough in Paradise: I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of [the King Bird-of-Paradise] had run their course — year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods, with no intelligent eye…

A recent study at the Universite Laval in Quebec found that students consume 203 to 253 more calories after 45 minutes of activity requiring intense thought than students who relaxed for the same 45 minutes. Although the brain accounts for less than 2% of a person’s weight, it consumes 20% of the body’s energy. That’s…

The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics states: If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other. Liquid-Liquid barrier in Coffee with Creamer Credit: R.B. Boyer It’s called the “Zeroth Law” because it was discovered after the other laws, but is more fundamental than them.…

The title of this article might mislead some readers. While Bonobos and chimpanzees share a 94% genetic similarity to us, we need to remember that they are merely the closest relatives on the evolutionary tree that survives today. If both these species were to go extinct, which appears increasingly likely, the title of this article…

Antibiotic Resistance This message brought to you by the American Medical Association, Food and Drug Administration, and Centers for Disease Control: There is no scientific evidence that antibacterial soaps and other products have any health benefits, and there is reason to suspect they could contribute to a problem much more dangerous than a bellyache from…

Thomas Jefferson asserted that African-Americans were mentally inferior to whites, a sentiment that still pervades in white supremist circles. Former Harvard University President, Lawrence H. Summers, suggested that one of the reasons there are fewer women in science and engineering fields might be because of innate differences between women and men. News articles covering studies…

Once upon a time in Earth’s history, all life reproduced through cloning. Be it binary fission, budding, spores, fragmentation, or parthenogenesis, every parent produced exact replicas of itself by itself. Everything was very stable, and evolution moved at a glacial pace, restricted to chance mutations with extremely rare beneficial effects. Then, atleast 565 million years…

When they broke open molecules, they found atoms. When they broke open atoms, they found explosions. The Large Hadron Collider is an experiment of gargantuan proportions, 26.7 kilometers in circumference and costing 6.4 billion euros. It’s quest: to find Elementary Particles, that is, particles that are not made of other particles. It is an adventure…

House Dust Mite Credit: Food and Drug Administration In Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby Dick,” the white whale Ahab relentlessly hunted was so massive that flocks of birds would hover above it. Moby Dick was like a moving island, and an entire ecosystem had grown around its existence. Although we cannot see them with the…

The Yin and Yang of Energy and Matter Credit: Ryan Somma Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, E=mc2. When people think about this most popular of physics equations, they usually think of the awesome release of energy so starkly demonstrated in the mushroom cloud of an atomic blast, which is matter converting…

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr On 21 August, 1945 at 9:55 PM, young graduate student Harry K. Daghlian, Jr was working on an experiment at Los Alamos determining the critical masses of plutonium. With a 6.2 kg sphere of plutonium cradled on a table, he was placing tungsten carbide bricks around it, reflecting neutrons released from…