A jewelry store is an archive of the Earth. Every gem fixed to every ring or necklace was forged deep inside our planet, according to its own recipe of elements, temperature and pressure.

But it has taken a while for geologists to decode the cookbook for gems. Jade, for example, puzzled geologists for decades. “For a long time people looked at this crazy rock, and it didn’t make any sense,” said George Harlow, a geologist at the American Museum of Natural History. But thanks to the research of Dr. Harlow and other geologists, jade now has a back story: It formed in dying oceans.

Continue reading “In Glittering Gems, Reading Earth’s Story” →

In a letter to a fellow physicist in 1915, Albert Einstein described how a scientist gets things wrong:

“1. The devil leads him by the nose with a false hypothesis. (For this he deserves our pity.)

“2. His arguments are erroneous and sloppy. (For this he deserves a beating.)”

According to his own rules, Einstein should have been pitied and beaten alike. “Einstein himself certainly committed errors of both types,” the astrophysicist Mario Livio writes in his enlightening new book, “Brilliant Blunders.”

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For a strange sexual history, it’s hard to beat birds. In some lineages, bird penises have evolved to spectacular lengths. Ducks, for example, have corkscrew-shaped penises that can grow as long as their entire body. They use their baroque genitalia to deliver sperm to female reproductive tracts that are also corkscrew-shaped — but twisted in the opposite direction.

In other lineages of birds, however, the penis simply vanished. Of the 10,000 species of birds on Earth, 97 percent reproduce without using the organ. “That’s shocking, when you think about it,” says Martin Cohn, a biologist at the University of Florida.

Continue reading “The Sex Life of Birds, and Why It’s Important” →