September-October 2008

Mendeleev’s Dream, Come to Life

October 31, 2008

I remember being introduced to the periodic table in high school, feeling the pupils of my eyes go wide as I understood its revelation of a rational, almost musical structure in nature. We understand it better now . . .   more

A Rush So Rare

October 25, 2008

You haven’t really lived until you’ve experienced a total solar eclipse. That’s the first message I took away from Joe Rao’s October feature about chasing last August’s umbra through the Arctic in an airplane, “Shades of Glory,” and from the accounts of other totality witnesses that I came across in the course of fact checking—a process that left me with a bad case of eclipse envy.  more

Metamaterials Make Potter Portal Possible

September 27, 2008  [Updated 10/21/08]

Back in April, we featured physicist Michio Kaku’s story about the “invisibility cloaks” that have entered the realm of possibility thanks to “metamaterials” that bend light in counterintuitive ways, parting and rejoining light waves around an object the way a stream circumvents a rock. The technology is in an early stage of development: only a single wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum can be deflected around an object at a time, by a fixed structure. A flexible fabric that could divert all visible wavelengths around its wearer remains a fantasy, but then, until 2006 even the very simple version was thought impossible.  more

Bugged!

September 26, 2008

The late-19th and early 20th-century French naturalist and amateur entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, who started life as a butterfly-chasing, bug-loving kid, was the first to describe in detail the life of a species of processionary caterpillar. It was his account that provoked Terrence D. Fitzgerald, the author of our September cover story, “Lethal Fuzz,” to investigate the behavior of these toxic-bristled marchers, which, crawling nose to tail like the cars of a train, once managed to bring a real railroad to a standstill (PDF).  more

Mitohypochondria

September 10, 2008

Science is the Total Perspective Vortex: “in the fictional world of Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . . . allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected . . . it shows its victim the entire unimaginable infinity of the universe with a very tiny marker that says ‘You Are Here,’ which points to a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot.”  more

Are Dogs Our Closest Relatives?

Dog Days III

September 10, 2008

That’s the question asked, only partly tongue-in-cheek, by a 2008 review of studies in canine behavioral psychology (PDF) that comes to a startling conclusion: “[I]n many ways dogs are more human-like than any other species, including nonhuman primates.”

     Dogs’ “human-like behaviors” include an uncanny ability to interpret human body language, gaze, and other nonverbal cues, as well as to recognize as many as 200 words of human language. Their ability to “read” us exceeds that of either our closest genetic relatives (trained chimpanzees) or their own (tamed wolves), and there is evidence that the predisposition to do so is innate in dogs, not acquired anew through experience by each individual dog.  more

(Annie Gottlieb)