Discover, July 1, 1993

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Ball lightning is no UFO. It may be something at once more ordinary and more beautiful–a floating ball of self-sustaining chemistry.

David Turner does mostly bread-and-butter chemistry. The University of Bristol researcher is an expert on steam turbines, and he can, among other things, describe the conditions inside nuclear reactor turbines and the possible hazards of an explosion. But recently Turner realized that his work could help solve a more exotic puzzle. The peculiar chemistry of steam could help explain a strange weather phenomenon known as ball lightning.

Continue reading “Great Balls of Steam” →

Discover, June 1, 1993

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Bunny booms and bunny busts have deeper roots than bunny lusts. When dark spots obscure the sun, the clock runs out on bunny fun.

The snowshoe hare of northern Canada and Alaska offers a lesson in bouncing back from hard times. Every ten years or so, its population goes through a complete boom-to-bust cycle, collapsing almost to zero, then soaring back up just as quickly. A square mile of Yukon woods that had supported 600 hares in 1980 might have less than a dozen in 1985, and then 600 again in 1990.

Continue reading “Pacemaker of the Hares” →

Discover, June 1, 1993

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A deaf woman is talking to me on the phone. Her name is Joanne Syrja, and she is explaining to me how her hearing deteriorated over time. She was never able to hear high frequencies, she says, and as the years went by, that ceiling of sound descended until she could hear nothing at all. But she can now hear me.

The questions I ask her are transformed into pulses of electricity that travel over telephone lines and are changed back into waves of sound at her receiver. Then a microphone sitting in her ear transforms my voice once again into electricity.

Continue reading “Making Senses” →

Discover, May 1, 1993

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You are what you eat, and Eric Iverson’s artificial-life program eats Bach (or Gillespie, or Abdul). Then it spits out a new piece of music.

Ever since Pythagoras made numerical sense of octaves, fifths, and fourths, mathematicians have been stumbling onto hidden patterns in music. Over the centuries a few people have even tried to act on those discoveries and compose music mathematically. Nowadays that means using computers. One popular method is to generate notes randomly and then sort through them with an artificial-intelligence program–a set of general rules embodying the programmer’s vision of what makes music musical.

Continue reading “Metamusic” →

Discover, May 1, 1993

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Two and a half billion years hence, long after we are gone, Earth will lose its water, and the hardiest organisms will succumb to the sun.

Five billion years from now the sun will balloon into a red giant star and destroy Earth like a mote of dust in a blowtorch. By the time it does, though, our planet won’t be much to cry over. It will have spent its last 2 billion years not as a blue gem of life but as a dry, overheated ball of stone, like Venus.

Continue reading “A Vision of the End” →