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. […]
Category Archives: science
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Scientists’ clichéd superlatives
Scientists have discovered that everything they do is astonishingly robust, phenomenally novel, and groundbreakingly unprecedented. The authors of a new paper in the always entertaining Christmas issue of the British […]
Boars gone wild: Chernobyl edition
For wildlife, earth’s worst nuke disaster site continues to prove safer than living anywhere in range of humans. Ever since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, people have been almost entirely excluded […]
Pluto, then and now
This is a really fun look back at our attempts to visualize Pluto. I mean, look at even the most recent views acquired by the powerful Hubble space telescope. They […]
What turtles looked like before the evolution of shells
This one is 240 million years old, from the Triassic period, collected in Germany. The discoverers named it Pappochelys, which is derived from Greek words for ‘grandfather’ and ‘turtle’. These […]
Candid camera trap
These images, which I’ve edited a bit in Lightroom, are some of the gems from Snapshot Serengeti, a project that amassed 1.2 million sets of photographs from motion-sensor activated camera traps […]
