Discover, February 28, 1995

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At times the desert can make people seem small and inconsequential and even foolish. Bill Schlesinger feels that way today. With spikes and tape measure, he and co-worker Jane Raikes have staked out some 100 square yards of desert land in the Jornada Basin, 15 miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Their claim includes some low-slung olive-drab creosote bushes, a clump of wispy tan snakeweed, and a lot of bare soil. Some ants roam the ground. A palm-size Texas horned lizard tries to stay cool in the shade of a creosote. It is a patch of desert that looks pretty much like countless other patches of desert in North America.

Continue reading “How to make a desert” →

Discover, February 1, 1995

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Before 1977 life came in two fundamental flavors: bacteria and the rest of us. The bacteria, also known as prokaryotes, had DNA that floated free in the cell, whereas the eukaryotes–such as fungi, plants, and animals–had their DNA balled up in a nucleus. But in 1977 Carl Woese, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois, showed that there was actually a third type of life, a group of prokaryotes he called the archaea. Not only are the archaea genetically distinct from the other prokaryotes–which Woese renamed eubacteria, or true bacteria–they are more closely related to us than they are to Escherichia coli.

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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” →