Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

10 Lies Planet Earth Is Telling You

April 22, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Earth

Today is Earth Day, some will tell you. (It's also my mom's birthday, you guys.) But if you were going to wish someone a happy birthday—which isn't exactly what Earth Day is, but it's as close as we'll ever get—would you want to send your regards if you knew that person was a conniving, shameless, pathological liar? No, no you would not. So, before you go around wishing "Happy Day!" to this planet we live on, here are some ways the Earth is trying to fool you. 01. Earth is smoother than a billiard ball. Remember that time you thought Earth had "peaks" and "valleys" and "altitude and "sea ... Read More

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Lessons From the Reverse Engineering of Nature

April 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

On the Significance of Species Beginning in the mid-1980s with evolutionary biologist and writer Stephen J. Gould, the University of Minnesota has invited world-renowned speakers to give public addresses in a lecture series named for the university's longtime president and Graduate School dean, Guy Stanton Ford. In 1994, I had just started as assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution and behavior when I was thrilled to discover that the speaker for that year would be Richard Dawkins, another famous evolutionary biologist and writer. I joined the hundreds in the packed ... Read More

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Space Probe to Measure How Sloshed Mother Earth Is

March 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

What do the fates of the tiny Pacific island nations of Tuvalu, Tonga, Kiribati and the Russian launch of a gleaming new European gravity satellite have in common? Gravity itself. Variations in Earth's gravity field — which is a reflection of how Earth's mass is distributed around the planet — is as subject to the constant motions of the world's oceans as it is from massive mountain chains. And in how those seas slosh around the globe lies the fate of some 600 million people living in low-lying nations and coastal areas around the world. Their futures are linked inextricably to ... Read More

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The Search for Intelligent Light

July 3, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

Even the most casual driver need strap in to negotiate the perilous twists of the single-lane road that winds up California’s Mount Hamilton to the Lick Observatory. But the biggest twist of the evening will require something of a mental seat belt. It lies inside the control room of the three-meter telescope, where University of California, Berkeley astronomer Geoff Marcy and his colleague from San Francisco State, Debra Fischer, train their lens on distant stars and search for a telltale sign of advanced stellar civilization: lights. Yup, these are reputable scientists looking for ... Read More

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A Take on Earth’s Temperature, Post-Bali

December 20, 2007 • By • Leave a Comment

Arctic ice is going the way of the Wicked Witch of the West, and we should prepare for more of the severe storms that blew Dorothy into Oz. Those are among the conclusions of a series of new academic studies, which indicate that as the world's nations debate the best way to deal with climate change, global warming appears to be accelerating. According to newly published research, the Greenland ice sheet is melting more quickly than expected, and surface waters in the Arctic are at record temperature levels. Such reports suggest our earlier estimates of global temperature increases may have ... Read More

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