icon

germs1

SizeSize

How’s Your Microbiota Today?

[“… there are more than 10 trillion cells in the human body, and ten times that many bacteria living inside it (yes, we are more “they” than “us,” at least in number).”  Spectrums, chapter 2] Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiologist at … Read more

xkcdmoney

NumbersNumbers

xkcd Tackles Big Numbers

The popular tech comic site xkcd has created an amazing huge poster to help explain terms like million, billion, and trillion… While the poster is way bigger than your screen can handle, you should see navigation aids to help you move around. … Read more

feynmanflower

SpectrumsSpectrums

Feynman: Ode to a Flower

The more you know about the world around you, the more amazing it becomes. Unfortunately, there are those who believe that science dulls the appreciation of beauty. Not so. As Carl Sagan once quipped, “It does no harm to the … Read more

spectrumsgalaxies

SpectrumsSpectrums

Write Your Name in Galaxies

The universe contains billions of galaxies, and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has already photographed millions of them. But each galaxy is different — some are elongated, some are circular… If you look closely at a galaxy and kind of … Read more

hatchimg

SpectrumsSpectrums

The Spectrum of Anger

Spectrums are an important way to communicate — whether expression emotion or intent. A few years ago Michael Hatch wrote a funny (and irreverent) book called Hatch’s Order of Magnitude that laid out dozens of different spectrums around us and … Read more