Before the telephone wounded them and email administered the death blow, handwritten letters were useful: They let you know who the crazies were. A lunatic’s barbed wire script would lurch in circles across the page, like a fly with a missing wing. No longer. On Twitter and Gmail and Facebook and elsewhere, the justified left- and right-hand margins can temper a lot of brewing delirium.
That’s one reason I miss correspondence. A more essential reason is that, perhaps like you during these months under quarantine, I’ve rarely felt so isolated. I speak with my family and friends on the phone, but my heart is only two-thirds in it; I’m not a telephone person. I dislike Zoom even more. Is that really my walleyed gaze in the “Hollywood Squares” box on my laptop?
Physicists think that in this truer theory, gravity must have a quantum form, like the other forces of nature. Researchers have sought the quantum theory of gravity since the 1930s. They’ve found candidate ideas — notably string theory, which says gravity and all other phenomena arise from minuscule vibrating strings — but so far these possibilities remain conjectural and incompletely understood. A working quantum theory of gravity is perhaps the loftiest goal in physics today.
What is it that makes gravity unique? What’s different about the fourth force that prevents researchers from finding its underlying quantum description? We asked four different quantum gravity researchers. We got four different answers.
Like in Whitman’s poem, the night is when the day’s distractions cease and the soul is revealed. For each McClaren, the night, the old house, and the soul grow into something different. Sleep is closely associated with night, but after trauma, sleep becomes a barometer for the waking hours. How the McClarens sleep or don’t sleep, dream, or sleepwalk becomes a part of their struggle to move on from a shattered life. In the end, they must all decide what the stars mean to them.
Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds was a surprise bestseller – a peppy survey of the science of bird intelligence rivalled only by Tim Birkhead’s masterful Bird Sense in its ability to overthrow our misconceptions about the complexity and ingenuity of bird brains. Now Ackerman, one of the most acclaimed science writers in the US, is back with another book about birds, one that delves deeper into the wonders and peculiarities of the avian world, seeking to explode the conventional idea that, as the opening of the book puts it, “there is the bird way, and there is the mammal way”. This book is a celebration of the dizzying variety of bird life and behaviour, one that will enthral birders and non-birders alike.
What is meat? You might say it's simple: water, fat, muscle, connective tissue — you know, all that tasty-sounding stuff.
But those at the forefront of developing cell-cultured meat have a different idea. Maybe meat is the product not of killing animals but of cultural consensus.
Iridescent rainbow in the gutter
red orange yellow holographic shine
closer, blue green indigo bedazzles
courtesy of Benson Hedges