The process of evolution, through which single-celled organisms slowly developed over billions of years into exponentially more sophisticated forms of life, has inexplicably culminated in local Albuquerque resident Mitch Szabo, leading evolutionary biologists reported Monday.
The Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot project has released a new website cataloguing England’s Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Rock art. There’s some truly beautiful pieces shown there – this is my favorite:
The Daily Mail also has an article on this project.
& in P.N.A.S. – Is an eclipse described in the Odyssey?
Plutarch and Heraclitus believed a certain passage in the 20th book of the Odyssey (“Theoclymenus’s prophecy”) to be a poetic description of a total solar eclipse. In the late 1920s, Schoch and Neugebauer computed that the solar eclipse of 16 April 1178 B.C.E. [...]
Stoclet-Fries: Lebensbaum (Werkvorlage), (1905/09) by Gustav Klimt. (Full image)
Kenneth Chang in the NY Times talks about The Grim Story of Maya Blue:
The vibrant sky color can be seen on pottery, murals and other artifacts produced by the Maya people of Central America centuries ago and the unusual, durable pigment remains vibrant today long after other colors have faded away.
It [...]
Colin McGinn reviews Oliver Sack’s new book, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain
Sacks opens his book with a striking case, rather literally striking. Tony Cicoria, a forty-two-year-old orthopedic surgeon, was making a phone call to his mother when he was struck in the face by lightning. He thought he was dead [...]
‘cos it’s Valentines day – Evolution, by Langdon Smith:
When you were a tadpole and I was a fish
In the Paleozoic time,
And side by side on the ebbing tide
We sprawled through the ooze and slime,
Or skittered with many a caudal flip
Through the depths [...]
