In this holiday season, our thoughts invariably turn to our families. But astronomers have a much broader definition of family. While the rest of us are researching ancestral histories back through terrestrial years, astronomers are building a family tree on a much broader scale: the origin of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. We are
English is a very complicated language with hundreds of thousands of words, so it’s not surprising that many people get confused about word meanings. How many ways are there to embarrass yourself? At least 43, according to the article “43 Embarrassing Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make” by Christina DesMarais (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/43-embarrassing-grammar-mistakes-even-smart-people-make). I’m not going to
Now that the presidential election has been 99 percent settled, the next contest on the political sports schedule is the lineup of President-Elect Biden’s Cabinet. So far, he is keeping his promise to emphasize diversity, which is good because there are a lot of constituencies that expect to be represented. Of course, it wasn’t always
Have you ever read about someone’s accomplishments and think “I wish I’d done that!”? This can be doubly true if you’re a professional and you see how others in your field are surpassing you. One of the worst professions for envy is journalism. The stories your competitors found — and you missed — are on
First, the bad news — Ladakh, a plateau on the northern tip of India, has a major problem. With only four inches of rain a year, this area depends upon winter snow and mountain glaciers for most of its water. But due to climate change, the snow is melting earlier and the glaciers are receding.
What is the loudest noise you can imagine? The human ear’s pain threshold is near 130 decibels. For comparison, a jackhammer puts out about 100 decibels, and a jet engine comes in at about 150 decibels. Yet there was a sound that was measured at least 172 decibels 100 miles from the source. This source
The Pantone Color Institute has just announced the color of the year for 2021, and as befitting leaving the chaos of 2020, it has chosen two colors. This is only the second time in 22 years that two colors have been selected. As explained on the Pantone website (https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2021), their selections for next year are —
Between an election and the formation of a new government, we always go through a period of governance that includes people who are about to lose their jobs. We’ve adopted the expression “lame duck” for this period, as in a lame duck session of Congress. But where did this expression originate? And I can understand
The flexibility of the English language has always been a source of fascination for me. In the past, I’ve written about the origins of words and expressions, and how word meanings change over time. Recently, I’ve found another example in an article entitled “25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites” by Judith Herman (https://getpocket.com/explore/item/25-words-that-are-their-own-opposites). It’s
Along with pets, some nice plants really brighten a homestead. You may have heard that houseplants can also improve air quality. But is it really true? Well, maybe. Some supporting evidence comes from NASA, which was wondering if living greenery could help clean the air aboard a space station. A 1989 NASA experiment found that