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Four days ago I wrote about the Centennial Light, the carbon-filament bulb that has been burning in a Livermore fire station since 1901. My argument was that the bulb doesn’t prove there was some lost secret of durability. It lasts because it runs very dim. An incandescent filament forces a trade …
In 1931 the British Medical Journal published a paper by a 42-year-old pathologist describing eight women in Bombay. Four were treated with liver and four with Marmite. Nobody was randomized and there was no control group. By the standards a journal would apply today, it is an anecdote with a …
Two weeks ago I wrote that permanent daylight saving time is a vote about January. The argument went like this. The US already spends about 34 weeks a year on daylight time, so the Sunshine Protection Act would only change the roughly 18 weeks from November to mid-March. That makes it a decision …
In 1863, a young Army engineer named Henry Martyn Robert was stationed in New Bedford, Massachusetts, getting over a fever he had caught in Panama. Someone asked him to chair a public meeting at the First Baptist Church about defending the harbor. He didn’t know how to run a meeting, and this one …
At Fire Station 6, 4550 East Avenue, Livermore, California, a hand-blown light bulb with a carbon filament hangs from the ceiling over the fire engines. It has been burning, with a few interruptions, since 1901. The Shelby Electric Company of Shelby, Ohio made it in the late 1890s, and someone …
There are two ways to keep a crop variety from going extinct, and I keep switching sides on which one matters more. One is to dry the seed, seal it, and freeze it in a mountain. The other is to keep planting it every year in the place where it was bred. People call these ex situ and in situ …
In May 1958, in a hospital laboratory in Paris that had not existed a year before, a 32-year-old pediatrician named Marthe Gautier looked at cells from a boy with Down syndrome and counted 47 chromosomes. Two years earlier, Tjio and Levan had shown that the normal human count was 46. Nobody had yet …
Tomorrow most of Europe sets its clocks back an hour. The United States does the same a week later, on November 1. As usual, a lot of people will say we should stop changing the clocks and keep summer time all year. This year that view has more weight behind it than usual. The House passed H.R. 139, …
I’ve never been to the Darvaza gas crater, and nobody is going to fly me there. This is a field report pieced together from satellite numbers, wire stories and the accounts of people who have stood at the rim. I’m writing it because the crater is doing something odd right now, and the usual reaction …
Most short biographies of Ola Mildred Rexroat open with the same fact: she was the only Native American woman among the 1,074 Women Airforce Service Pilots of the Second World War. It is a good fact and it is true. My argument today is that it has become the wrong headline, or at least an incomplete …