Calypte anna: Anna’s hummingbird
I love the melodious scientific name for this little hummingbird, a species native to the West Coast. The genus name, Calypte, probably comes from a Greek word for veil, a reference to […]
At Crater Lake, ‘exclamations of wonder and joy akin to pain’
This image of Crater Lake, shot with my point-and-shoot camera, doesn’t come close to conveying the numinous power of this place – not even the finest photography can do that. […]
Fickle media drive disaster relief. Guess who loses.
These estimates come from a terrific analysis of the influence of mass media on U.S. government response to 5,000 natural disasters around the world from 1968 to 2002. It shows […]
How Mexico’s ‘chicken peacocks’ conquered the world
Note the boy on the left and the dog on the lower right, both seizing the moment to make off with a prized turkey. This engraving was made in 1589, […]
Imagining the moon
Mare Crisium in a lithograph printed in 1834 from observations at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. The photograph was made by an amateur astronomer in 2010. The moon “appeared like […]
Polychrome humans: Harwood’s ‘Bust of a Man’
People from Africa were widely present in 18th Century England, which by then had monopolized the colonial slave trade. From slave ships, many Africans made their way into domestic service […]
A robot judges my photos
Over the years, I’ve uploaded thousands of photos into online storage. On a whim last week, I typed the keyword ‘love’ into the search field. Google’s algorithm delivered one result: […]
How many scientists does it take to invent a cancer therapy?
I really love this data visualization by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. Among other accomplishments, it deflates the myth of the solitary genius and shows the foundational […]
What a “game-changing” cancer therapy really looks like
A 55-year-old diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in 1990 could expect to lose more than 20 years of life as a result of the cancer. By 2010, the loss in […]
Strangely beautiful visions of cancer
There’s a strange beauty to these technically superb visualizations of cancer. In the image above, a purple label marks lung cancer cells driven by the Kras oncogene in a genetically […]
