Shannon Leigh O’Neil and I recently took a long-planned road trip through New York’s Finger Lakes region to soak in some world-class art, science, nature and wine. The first stop on our ambitious itinerary was the Corning Museum of Glass, a collection spanning 35 centuries of glassmaking, from utilitarian objects to fine art. The special …
Read more “The Blaschka Glass Sea Creatures: A Victorian Vision of Ocean Life”
Last month, I gave a talk at the monthly history lecture series produced by the Society for the Appreciation of Social Studies (SASS) in Brooklyn. The subject: the symbols and science of the Freemasons, a secret society founded in England during the Enlightenment to encourage is members’ intellectual edification. Despite its hush-hush nature, the Masons …
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A study published last week in the journal Royal Society Open Science described everyone’s worst nightmare: rats that appeared to be too smart to eat poison put out by exterminators on Henderson Island, a Pacific islet where survivors from the whaleship Essex landed in 1820. Researchers described a case report in which a project to eradicate invasive rats …
Read more “Oh, Rats: Rodents Too Smart for Exterminators on Island visited by ‘Essex’ Castaways”
Since last summer, many Americans have called for a woman to replace one of the men currently pictured on U.S. currency. The $10 was due for revision first, owing to the Treasury’s efforts to make bills more resistant to counterfeiting. That would have meant booting Alexander Hamilton–the first Secretary of the Treasury–off the $10 bill. Awkward. …
This week, whale watchers went bananas over sightings of about 250 northern right whales in the plankton-rich waters around Cape Cod. The pods represented half of the total population of these critically endangered cetaceans, one of the world’s rarest animals. Now, in the first assessment since the end of the 19th century whaling era, the British …
Read more “Southern Right Whale Recovery Could Take Decades, Study Finds”