It gives me great pleasure to link to this excellent piece on the underlying weirdness of Canada's national creature, the beaver. "There is an element of the sacred in the beaver, if only in its deep weirdness. One million years ago, beavers the size of bears roamed
Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a long-awaited milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory. That sparked public excitement as scientists have for decades talked about how fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes
Sarah Marshall asks why we are so fascinated with serial killers: "How are we even to know that Samuel Little had a photographic memory if almost all the women in his drawings look so much like one another? Why did the seventy-nine-year-old man who happened to
On the side of Kulen Mountain, where looters stole a sandstone sculpture depicting Prajnaparamita, the goddess of transcendent wisdom. The statue — 59 inches high, 15 inches wide — is missing one arm, the other chopped off at the elbow. For more than two decades, this stolen relic sat more than 8,
After decades of what the World Bank has called “colossal failures,” and two years of hyperinflation, Lebanon's state-owned power supplier has collapsed, and little electricity is generated or delivered in most of the country. Except, that is, in the Chouf. Here, as part of a mandate which
Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author, has become an unlikely publishing sensation. His book The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, written at his wife’s insistence, sold more than 800,000 copies in Germany, and has now hit the best-seller lists in 11
It looks like there are body parts everywhere. That’s how Steve Butler knows he has come to the right place. There are at least three noses on the counter. There’s a stack of eyes, and a box full of ears and fingers. In the corner, there’s the
A little over a year ago, scientists reported on a large area at the foot of the Asperillo cliff, on the coast of the Doñana Natural Area in Huelva, Spain. There, along with numerous animal footprints, other footprints had been found – those of hominids. Until then, the only time reference
In the 1920s, the auto industry chased people off the streets of America, says Clive Thompson, by waging a brilliant psychological campaign. They convinced the public that if you got run over by a car, it was your fault. Pedestrians were to blame. People didn’t belong in the streets;
A group of researchers announced on Wednesday that they had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in space-time called a wormhole. Physicists described the achievement as another small step in the effort to understand the relation
Almost one quarter of the Number One hits on the American music charts between 1958 and 1990 were in multiple keys, like Michael Jackson's “Man in the Mirror,” where the key change is one of the most memorable things about the song. At the 2 minute and 52
The Isle of Vaila is a 757-acre emerald chunk of land topped with a herd of heritage sheep and a 17th-century mansion built to resemble a castle. The longtime owners are selling for $2 million. The island is one of roughly 100 islands in the Shetland Islands archipelago