Inner Nature: Good news in science
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
This month, I highlight some of the great things that are happening in the world which science had a hand in delivering. Enjoy.
Klamath dam is down and salmon swim freely upstream for the first time in 100 years.[1]
The mighty Klamath river flows from the Cascade mountains along the Oregon-California and empties into the Pacific Ocean. In 1918, the first dams were...
ReFirement at Any Age: Waiting to Exhale
By Gail Supplee Tatum, Columnist, The Times
November is the month we celebrate Thanksgiving which is the gateway to the holiday season. These are all wonderful and comforting things to think about and look forward to, but there is something else that occurs every four years in our country.
I would be remiss if I did not talk about our power as citizens to vote for the candidate of your choice on election...
ReFirement at Any Age: Back to a Routine Life
By Gail Supplee Tatum, Columnist, The Times
For some, there are mixed feelings about getting back to a routine life.
Going from carefree living to structured tasks, business as usual, takes concentration and can be challenging.
However, many of us see this adjustment as a recalibration, like a new year and birthdays.
We are creatures of habit and routine, which is essential for quality of life. Flying...
Inner Nature: Gene Snatcher
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
In an earlier article[1] I wrote about tardigrades, a ubiquitous and indestructible animal with an extraordinary ability to endure adverse environmental conditions. This superpower is assisted by their entry into a dormant state called “tun”, in which they lose all their water and curl up into a husk. Tardigrades in the tun state can be subjected to boiling,...
Inner Nature: Did life originate at hydrothermal vents?
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
The deep ocean floor is a desolate place: a desert with frigid waters, crushing pressures and inky darkness. But in the expansive and featureless wasteland are oases populated by bizarre life forms. These oases are located at hydrothermal vents, which were discovered in the mid-1970s but remained difficult to reach and to study for many decades. Recent technological...
Inner Nature: Forces of Nature
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
The story so far: The hot, dense singularity that was the source of the Big Bang exploded about 13.8 billion years ago (bya) and the energy in the explosion spread, cooled and became lumpy. The lumps were matter (~5%), dark matter (~25%), and dark energy (~70%).
To break it up into timelines after the instant of the Big Bang (A.B.B.):
Send...
ReFirement at Any Age: Pay attention
By Gail Supplee Tatum, Columnist, The Times
We live in a world where, now more than ever, we need to be alert and pay close attention to what we are doing, what we are saying, who we interact with and who we speak with.
We must be aware of the activity around us and of the people around us who are not paying attention. It could be a dangerous combination if we all were unaware of our surroundings!...
Inner Nature: Matter matters
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
In this article, I will extend the topic begun last month on the constitution of the universe as we currently understand it and simplify (or at least try!) the simply overwhelming vocabulary that attends this topic. And just to be clear about what the universe’s composition has to do with biology or bees…it has everything to do with biology and bees. Living...
Becoming the Best U: Lessons cancer taught me
By Nancy Plummer, Columnist, The Times
I am one of the lone survivors of ovarian cancer stage 4 and metastatic brain cancer. As we all just celebrated World Ovarian Cancer Awareness Day and Brain Cancer Awareness Month, I thought it best to bring more attention to it and do what I could to help others learn more about this deadly disease. I recognize that ovarian cancer is hard to diagnose since its...
Inner Nature: The current understanding of the nature of our universe
By Vidya Rajan, Columnist, The Times
The Big Bang was an explosion of immense power at a point in space about 13.7 billion years ago; the singularity from which everything in this universe – energy, space, time, matter – originated. Consensus on the universe’s origins from a fiery explosion emerged because of one incontrovertible signature that it left behind: a little bit of the heat from the...
