Aeon Magazine » Nature and Cosmos

Dolphins are not healers

Lori Marino — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 05:00:48 +0000

Imagine this. Jay, an eight-year-old autistic boy, whose behaviour has always been agitated and uncooperative, is smiling and splashing in the pool. A pair of bottlenose dolphins float next to him, supporting him in the water. Jay’s parents stand poolside as a staff member in the water engages him in visual games with colourful shapes. [...]

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Robot evolution

Emily Monosson — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 05:00:29 +0000

In a laboratory tucked away in a corner of the Cornell University campus, Hod Lipson’s robots are evolving. He has already produced a self-aware robot that is able to gather information about itself as it learns to walk. Like a Toy Story character, it sits in a cubby surrounded by other former laboratory stars. There’s [...]

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Accidental rewilding

George Monbiot — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 05:00:05 +0000

I stepped out into the sunlight, scarcely able to believe what I had seen or, rather, what I had not. I stared at the hills around me, contrasting them with the old photos of those same hills I had seen. Where dense forests now grew, forming a high, closed canopy — in the valleys, over [...]

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Sakura

Rebecca Giggs — Tue, 28 May 2013 05:00:55 +0000

It is peak sakura — the short, spring season of cherry-tree flowering that so besots Japan. In Ueno Park in Tokyo, falling blossoms settle over the sleeping salarymen, recumbent on tarpaulins with traffic masks yanked down around their necks. Curtains of petals draw open and closed in the wind around huddled teenagers. The flowers land [...]

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Middle Earth

Kurt Hollander — Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:22 +0000

Though he never actually crossed it, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras is sometimes credited with having first conceived of the Equator, calculating its location on the Earth’s sphere more than four centuries before the birth of Christ. Aristotle, who never stepped over it either and knew nothing about the landscape surrounding it, pictured the equatorial region [...]

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Splendid no more

John Lemons — Tue, 14 May 2013 05:00:19 +0000

It is early morning, and I am sitting on a boulder near the bottom of Yosemite Falls. I have lost my bearings, meandering around in a maze of paved trails that I never knew existed until today. I worked and lived in Yosemite for about 15 years and thought I knew the place like the [...]

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Uprooted

Sarah Pike — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:00:45 +0000

One day last summer, a young woman looked down on a small crowd of vocal supporters and police officers from her hammock or ‘sky pod’, 60ft above an old logging road in Moshannon State Forest in Pennsylvania. The pod was tied to trees and anchored to a blockade across the road, so that anyone trying [...]

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Specimens

Matthew Battles — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:00:41 +0000

I’ve been nursing a gentle obsession with a quartet of bone-white, thumb-sized figurines. I first saw them, lined up in a row, on the cover of Miguel Tamen’s book Friends of Interpretable Objects (2001). They rested in a pair of open hands, looking toothy, and vital, exuding a cool glimmer, while evoking the long Arctic [...]

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In the dark

Alexander B Fry — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:38 +0000

I’m sitting at my desk at the University of Washington trying to conserve energy. It isn’t me who's losing it; it’s my computer simulations. Actually, colleagues down the hall might say I was losing it as well. When I tell people I’m working on speculative theories about dark matter, they start to speculate about me. [...]

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Spaced out

Greg Klerkx — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:19 +0000

Back in the 1970s, my brother and I shared a cabin aboard a space cruiser. Dominated by a sturdy bunk bed, it was roughly four by four metres square with a porthole at one end and an airlock at the other. Our little cabin was wonderfully hermetic: it contained all necessary life support systems — [...]

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