Discover, January 31, 1993
The Galápagos Islands changed the way we look at the world. After Charles Darwin visited this archipelago off the coast of Ecuador in 1835, he noted how the different islands kept groups of closely related animals apart from one another, allowing them to develop into separate species. Those ideas would eventually become part of our shared intellectual heritage with the publication, in 1859, of the Origin of Species.
Discover, September 30, 1992
You never hear someone say, Bartender, another round of C2H5OH for my friends here, or, Do you want coffee with C8H10N4O2 or decaf? The only substance commonly known by its chemical formula is good old H2O. Water is not only ubiquitous, it’s simple: two hydrogens perch on a lone oxygen like ears on an atomic mouse. When schoolteachers search for the perfect molecule to introduce elementary concepts of chemistry, they naturally turn to water. But first impressions are deceiving.
Discover, September 30, 1992
Artur Ekert can feel secure. If his friends are within 200 yards of him, he can send messages to them in an unbreakable code. It’s not that his signals are immune to wiretapping; snoopers can listen in. It’s not that his code is too complex for anyone to crack; it’s actually fairly simple. Ekert’s secrets are guaranteed by the basic laws of energy and matter. They forbid anyone from cracking his code, ever. That includes the army, the CIA, and, assuming that laws of physics are really laws, even God.
Discover, September 1, 1992
Transport yourself to the Madagascan forest 1,000 years ago. Tramping along, you notice a giant creature hanging by long, hook-shaped hands and feet from a tree branch. It lumbers along in slow motion, much like a sloth. But while a typical sloth weighs 12 pounds, this one tops 120. And unlike a sloth’s rodentlike face, this animal’s countenance is vaguely human, with big, intelligent eyes. It climbs down the trunk and crawls on its belly to a nearby tree. There an even odder animal sits, pawing at low branches. It looks similar to the first animal, with the same face and body. But at 500 pounds, it is as big as a bear.
Discover, July 1, 1992
Geologists have their own Atlantis: the Earth’s earliest crust. Over the eons, colliding plates have drowned the planet’s primordial crust, plunging it down into the hot mantle whence it came. The oldest rocks known to have escaped this recycling are 3.96 billion years old. By then Earth had been evolving for 600 million years.
Now two Harvard geochemists claim they have found a clear record of Earth’s first crust–or at least of when it formed. They say it formed within 100 million years after the planet itself coalesced (along with the rest of the solar system) from a swirling nebula of gas and dust. The evidence isn’t an actual rock; it’s a chemical footprint the crust left behind.