The cluttered, winding halls of the Harvard Natural History Museum unfurl into impressively dense, colorful collections at every turn. I easily spend an hour looking at the rocks and minerals room alone, scanning down the rows of glass cases and pointing out oddly organic shapes and textures.
Walking across the grounds of the Arnold Arboretum, equipped with nametag and field gear, I was approached by an older woman one morning. She asked me, “How are the trees feeling today?” I wanted to correct her – that I was not a groundskeeper, but a researcher. But as I clipped, pruned, measured, weighed, read […]
Bees are emblems of social complexity. Their honeycombs—intricate lattices dripping with food—house bustling hive members carrying out carefully orchestrated duties like defending against predators and coordinating resource collection.
You may have once startled a duck or two after tossing a rock into a pond to watch the water ripple. But imagine watching ripples in space-time as the result of two black holes crashing into one another.
Alligators wandering through inundated streets, snakes hiding on porch doors, deer careening across neighborhoods, and other wild sights emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. What else would you expect? Hurricanes can shift ecology in strange ways.
In the 2004 film I, Robot, Detective Del Spooner asks an A.I. named Sonny: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” Sonny responds: “Can you?”