Jeepers peepers, the crew at the Times might as well have called this week’s science section “the eye-candy issue.” It is a delirium of imagery. Well, they probably didn’t consciously choose a theme, but…
Check out Carl Zimmer‘s story of discovery — getting further boost today from a press conference — that the armies battling across the southern Sudan for decades have not, so far, destroyed its wildlife. Aerial surveys indicate, in a startling surprise, that the region retains what may be the world’s most bewilderingly immense, migrating herds of terrestrial animals. The Times’s vivid online image slideshow (at story link) has its origin at the Nat’l Geographic Society. FYI, The N.Geo’s own story by Nick Wadhams, with the Wildlife Conservation Society as partner, is here. Could be slaughter and displacement of people re-opened a niche? And elsewhere in Sudan, warfare has been hell on people and animals alike.
Ditto, as a visual feast, for Cornelia Dean‘s profile of a Harvard woman who focusses on micro-imagery. She captures stunning images of nano-devices and strange behaviors of living and non-living systems in close-up. She insists it is not art. It comes awful close. The story links to a multimedia accompinent, a narrated slide show.
In perhaps clever or perhaps inadvertent contrapuntal fashion, the lead article by Kenneth Chang is all about how NOT to see something — that is, about newly devised metamaterials with negative indices of refraction. The piece’s hook is the well-publicised work recently toward a microwave “cloaking” or invisibility device, mainly at Duke U. Chang provides a much-needed history lesson in how scientists learned such things are possible. Maybe at visible wavelengths someday, too, but that’s a very big maybe. (Chang ought to have punctured one fevered adolescent fantasy re invisibility. The invisible man, or the invisible kid strolling through a high school locker room hoping for ogling thrills, would be blind. Physics populizer Lawrence Krauss first explained this to The Tracker. If light goes through or around you without distortion it’ll skip your retina, too.)
The whole sci section is here. A podcast by editor David Corcoran is to be found, with some scrolling, here.
Additional notables include:
Natalie Angier‘s father’s day ode to sperm, an amazing cell, she tells us. Oh….
Dennis Overbye on the rise and fall of a “Goldilocks” planet around a distant star, once imagined as conceivably comfortable for Earthly life — and discovery that another one in the same system may be the real McCoy.
Elizabeth Svoboda on Mal de débarquement, a rare condition in which the brain, once adjusted to the rocking motions of a ship, may never get over it. The result is a persistent sensation of a bobbing boat even on land. In California we call it earthquake legs (…ok, I made that up).
As ever, lots more….
-CP
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