Discover, January 31, 1995

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The spidery robot named Dante first tried to make history in January 1993 by descending into an Antarctic volcano, only to have its communication tether snap after 20 feet. Last August, Dante erased most of that embarrassment successfully scrambled down into the crater on Mount Spurr, a volcano 80 miles west of Anchorage, Alaska. Granted, the robot had to be rescued on the return trip, when it tipped over 350 feet short of the crater rim. But a stumble on the homestretch was distinctly better than barely getting out of the starting block–especially given the challenging terrain.

Continue reading “One small step” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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The ghost of George Callendar haunts today’s global warming experts. In 1938 Callendar, a British coal engineer by trade and a climatologist by avocation, demonstrated that global temperatures had been rising for the previous 50 years. “He realized that it was most likely due to the burning of fossil fuels, and he predicted global warming from there on out,” explains Michael Schlesinger, a climatologist at the University of Illinois. “And then the warming ceased; there was a cooling period from about 1940 until the 1970s.”

Continue reading “The North Atlantic cycle” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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In 1994, America became addicted to autostereograms–those swatches of psychedelic wallpaper that dissolve into three-dimensional images when you stare at them cross-eyed long enough. What the slack-jawed millions may not have realized, though, as they stared at books and posters, is that they were experiencing an enduring mystery of neurology: When the brain perceives a 3-D object, which comes first, the object or the 3-D?

Continue reading “Wallpaper for the mind” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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“We take crayfish for granted,” says Steven Hasiotis, a paleontologist at the University of Colorado. “People have grown up with them, chased them around, put them in their aquariums, gotten yelled at by their moms for keeping them. I knew two or three people who had to flush theirs down the toilet.” But at a Geological Society of America meeting last May, Hasiotis reported a new reason to respect these commonplace crustaceans. Crayfish were once thought to have originated 140 million years ago, but Hasiotis has discovered 220-million-year-old specimens that are almost identical to modern ones. He thinks crayfish may be as much as 300 million years old. That would put them in a class with roaches and sharks as some of the most enduring animals in history.

Continue reading “Back to the sea II” →

Discover, January 31, 1995

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If evolution is a movie, it’s the job of paleontologists to look for the lost footage. This past year they came out of the vaults with an awesome director’s cut of one of the strangest films ever made: A Whale Is Born.

For decades researchers have claimed that whales are descended from an extinct hyenalike land mammal, called a mesonychid, that walked back into the sea between 50 and 60 million years ago. (Mesonychids and all other land mammals are themselves descended from a fish that crawled out of the sea much earlier.) By 40 million years ago the transition from four-legged land animal to fishlike ocean dweller was almost complete.

Continue reading “Back to the sea” →