After a couple months of merciless story deadlines, hard disk crashes, and strange viruses that you only find out about once you have kids, the Loom is creaking back to life. Expect several postings this week. For now, let me direct you to a review I wrote a couple weeks ago for The New York Times Book Review about Devil in the Mountain, a book about the Andes. The author, an Oxford geologist, dissects these mountains like a surgeon cutting open a living person. It reminded me of the times I’ve driven around with geologists; all of the landscape that blurs past most of us is a vast palimpsest to them, and waving their hand out the window, they tell you about hundreds of millions of years of mountain building and destruction. Short of grabbing a geologist for a ride, I’d suggest getting the book.
The New York Times, July 25, 2004
SIMON LAMB, a geologist at Oxford University, got a call one day from a television producer about pictures of Atlantis. The lost civilization could be found on 12,000-foot high plains nestled in the Andes Mountains. An Atlantis expert (whatever that is) had shown the producer satellite photographs of the plains, pointing out canals running in parallel straight lines for miles. What more proof could one ask for? The producer called Lamb, an expert on the Andes, for confirmation.
Chris Mooney has just blogged on a depressing new report that came out today that documents how the Bush administration puts politics before science.
Could test tube babies be revealing some of the hidden workings of evolution? It’s a definite possibility, judging from some recent reports about the balance of males and females.
Recently I’ve been trying to imagine a world without leaves. It’s not easy to do at this time of year, when the trees around my house turn my windows into green walls. But a paper published on-line today at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science inspires some effort. A team of English scientists offer a look back at Earth some 400 million years ago, at a time before leaves had evolved. Plants had been growing on dry land for at least 75 million years, but they were little more than mosses and liverworts growing on damp ground, along with some primitive vascular plants with stems a few inches high. True leaves–flat blades of tissue that acted like natural solar panels–were pretty much nowhere to be found.