Category Archives: Science

The Art of the Bunt: Deconstructing Dickey’s “Tricky Hit”

Aki Iwamura lays down a bunt. Photo by imagesbyferg.

Bunting, says Bill James of Sabermetrics fame, is “the only play in baseball that both sides applaud.” But years ago, every player – even sluggers like Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle – used bunting as a fundamental part of the game, and some coaches still prefer the bankable bunt when it comes to advancing runners, especially when a weak hitter steps to the plate.

Whatever your viewpoint, there’s little doubt that bunting is an art. Read on for the ins-and-outs of this venerable and controversial technique.

How Bunting Works

Driving by Larch Light

Photo courtesy Glowing Plant.

Would you want to live in a world that looks like a Pandora knockoff, or blares like the wall decorations of a stoner crash pad? What if you couldn’t turn it off?

Such were the questions raised when a Kickstarter campaign launched to “create real glowing plants in a do-it-yourself biolab in California.” At first, observers merely wondered if the technology could work. But as time passed, their questions moved on to more troubling concerns regarding the unregulated spreading of genetically modified seeds…

Could glow-in-the-dark plants replace streetlights?

Cloning, Hubris and the Dino-DNA “Use By” Date

Be careful what your wish for. Photo by MathKnight and Zachi Evenor.

We know surprisingly little about juvenile dinosaurs, so every time a paleontologist uncovers a clutch of eggs or embryos, it is cause for celebration – at least until someone in the media gets hold of the story and asks The Dreaded Question: “Is Jurassic Park only a few years away?” or some variant thereof.

Being a member of said media, I am occasionally assigned one of these stories. And, although I don’t much care for sensationalism in science coverage, I’m generally too thrilled to be researching dinosaurs and cloning to complain very much. Instead, I see it as an opportunity to tell a deeper story, like this one.

Could we resurrect dinosaurs from fossil embryos?

Questioning the Decline of Human Intelligence

Photo by Dan Kassem.

Science still struggles to define, measure or understand intelligence, let alone definitively nail down its genetic components. Yet one Stanford geneticist argues that civilization was a bad move, and that human intelligence has gradually ratcheted down  since leaving its hunter-gatherer days behind.

Is the Peter Principle killing our intellect, or is Crabtree’s model another unripe hypothesis that received too much media attention? Read on to find out.

Did human intelligence peak thousands of years ago?

How It’s Made: Crystal Edition

Photo by Alexander Van Driessche (note human for scale)

In physics, the term “crystal” designates a solid substance with internal symmetry and a related, regular surface pattern. But such a dry description cannot capture the intricacy and variety of materials found in snowflakes and crown jewels, or that power stereos and ultrasound machines, or that flavor our food. Nor can it convey the delicate dance of temperature, pressure and time that crystal growth requires.

Historically, growing crystals was as much art as science. Today, it requires precise technologies and technologies to control growth, often on a molecular scale.

How are crystals made?