It’s always difficult to peer into the past. All the proxy records we use to estimate the paleoclimate come with serious flaws and are limited to individual points on a very large planet. Many temperature reconstructions are actually proxies of proxies, for which the error bounds don’t just add but multiply. Now we can throw …
Cognitive biases are always interesting because understanding them is such an important aspect of critical thinking. We can only see the world through layers of filters, and it’s impossible to understand anything without adjusting for them. This week, researchers at the University of Virginia published work on a bias I’d never heard of before—I don’t …
Trilobites were among the most successful animals in the history of the planet, thriving for 250 million years before finally succumbing to the end-Permian Extinction, along with 80% of marine life. It’s the greatest extinction event in the fossil record, and we’re still not sure what caused it, being so long ago—most likely it was …
I almost forgot to share this week’s sciku! It was inspired by researchers at Stanford and TU/e who have been studying how hummingbirds hum. If you’ve spent any time watching hummingbirds, you might already know they answer: they don’t fly like regular birds that apply aerodynamic force to the undersides of their wings with every …
One of the main points that always comes up in our live Critique of the Week sessions is the importance of images in writing. “Show don’t tell” is the mantra of every creative writing workshop, and all it really means that illustration is more emotionally powerful than explanation. This concept seems counterintuitive because it is—shouldn’t …