Discover, May 31, 1992

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If you believe what you read in the papers, Sankar Chatterjee ought to be the crown prince of paleontology. Six years ago he announced that he had found the world’s oldest bird fossil. If beat the previous record not by a mere 1 or 2 million years but by 75 million. With one quick kick, it seemed, Chatterjee sent paleontologists who thought they knew something about how birds had evolved tumbling in the dust.

Discovering the oldest fossil of anything is obviously wonderful for a paleontologist’s career. The fossil instantly becomes the centerpiece of any future theory about how an animal evolved and what it evolved from. And not incidentally, the fossil finder becomes just as important.

Continue reading “Ruffled Feathers” →

Discover, April 1, 1992

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By the time Morrie Pongratz stepped outside to watch his experiment one night last July, the moon had set. But it couldn’t have competed with Pongratz’s experiment in any case. The experiment began at 3:37 a.m. eastern standard time, when a NASA satellite orbiting 270 miles overhead ejected two three-foot-long metal canisters, which then released 23 pounds of barium gas into space. Within seconds the barium blossomed into a giant yellow-green fireball, even bigger and brighter than a full moon. The release was spectacular, says Pongratz, a space physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. You’re on the ground in the dark, but up where the barium is, the sun is shining.

Continue reading “Making Auroras” →

Discover, April 1, 1992

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Along the southern border of the Sahara, in the luckless region known as the Sahel, a drought has been going on for 20 years now. In the 1970s hundreds of thousands of people succumbed to the effects of crop failures and cattle die-offs, and today the millions of farmers and nomads who inhabit the Sahel are still living on the edge. One potent symbol of their plight can be seen from space: Lake Chad, once as big as Lake Erie, is now a third the size. But in that desolate image Solomon Isiorho sees a reason for hope. Some of that vanished water, he says, may still be available for use.

Continue reading “The New Diviner” →

Discover, March 31, 1992

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Sitting in a noisy Manhattan restaurant, Joseph Weintraub cuts his steak with obvious pleasure. “This is much better than the one I had last night with the Times of London,” he shouts over the ambient chitchat.

Weintraub doesn’t have much free time these days, what with being wined, dined, and interviewed by newspapers, magazines, and film crews. Until recently, he led a low-profile life, working as a computer consultant and running a small software company in Woodside, Queens. That’s all changed, however, now that he has won the first annual Loebner Prizer, a context designed to see if computers can think.

Continue reading “Flake of Silicon” →

Discover, March 1, 1992

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When Burney Le Boeuf started studying elephant seals in 1968, his operation was pretty low tech. Le Boeuf was surveying 4,000-pound bulls at a rookery on Año Nuevo Island off the coast of California, and he had to find a way to tag them so that he would know which bull was which. First he tried a dye-filled fire extinguisher, which he blasted at the sleeping bulls’ flanks. But that woke them up. Then he threw plastic sandwich bags filled with paint at them–too messy. Then he tried a paint roller on a pole, which afforded a bit more control over the shape and placement of the marks.

Continue reading “Portrait in Blubber” →