This week’s essay takes its inspiration from Dinty Moore’s “Google Maps” form.
To interact with and read the story, in any order you choose, please click through the markers on the map.
Category: Science Writing
The making of a green city
At few millennia ago, Italy’s forests lay nearly bare –stripped down to the bones for the extravagant heating and building needs of some 60 million Romans at the height of the empire. Desperate for fresh supplies, the Romans looked up for a more frugal answer: the sun.
Mapping a community’s air
The word volatile has many meanings.
It can, for example, convey the violently responsive and on-edge –as in, a volatile person, or a volatile situation to avoid. Volatile can describe an object that is elusive, or one that can’t be held down. It can mean a thing that flies, as in the Spanish volador. Or it can mean, in the most scientific and precise terms, a chemical substance that is poised to evaporate at normal temperatures.
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The moon garden
All the moon’s light is borrowed: a gift from the sun, which alone illuminates our way through the solar system. For every 400,000 photons of sunlight that make the eight-minute trip to earth, exactly one will bounce off the moon on its way to us. This is because the moon is as fine a mirror… Continue reading The moon garden
