July 2011
12 posts
This is the sound of the aurora on Saturn. Pretty...
Tetrachromacy →
Humans get their color vision from three kinds of cone cells in the eyes, with response curves centered around the wavelengths we perceive as blue, green and red. As a result, the color space we can perceive is three-dimensional. Birds have four different kinds of cones, and so they can distinguish more shades of color than humans. It is, in a sense, the opposite of color blindness. And some...
The Last Island of the Savages →
There are few, if any uncontacted tribes left in the world. The Andaman islands, in the Bay of Bengal between India and Indonesia, were home to several such tribes. Most of them were contacted in British colonial times; one of the last, the Jarawa, laid down their weapons in the late nineties. But on the North Sentinel island, an isolated stoneage tribe still lives untouched by modern...
Killer Lakes →
On August 21, 1986, a deadly cloud rose from Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing nearly everyone in its path. The day after, 1700 people were dead and the lake, normally blue, was red. The disaster was determined to be caused by an outburst of carbon dioxide. CO2 accumulates in the lake’s deep bottom levels, where it remains in solution, undisturbed by the currents that temperature changes would...
Of Penis Panics, Cannibalistic Spirits and Dancing...
In Africa, penis theft runs rampant. In Native American communities in the Northern US and Canada, people could be possessed by a cannibalistic spirit and experience an insatiable hunger for human flesh. In medieval Europe, outbreaks of dancing manias caused hundreds of people to dance themselves into exhaustion and even death. What do these phenomena have in common?
We like to think of illness...
