If this wasn't a science page, if this happened 3,000 years ago in, say, a Middle Eastern desert, I would call it a Miracle. But it's not. It's just a plain, ordinary moment of "wow!"

First, the beginner's version. A man takes a bunch of metronomes, sets them ticking in different ways, then — and this is the crucial part — he lifts them collectively off the table, so their different motions now start to offset each other. And this happens:

But why? How does it work, you may be asking. I wondered too, and simply stated, what we have here is the transfer of momentum resulting in the alignment of motion. (Don't be afraid. Keep reading.)

Even more simply stated: As the metronomes tick back and forth, they affect the table, and because the table is designed to absorb the motion of the metronomes, the table itself starts to move. Now that the table is rocking ever so slightly, it begins to affect the metronomes on top. Metronomes that are moving with the table keep doing that. Metronomes not in sync with the table have their motions dampened, then countered, until they do it "the table's way." Eventually all the metronomes come into alignment.

That's what you saw in our small, chamber music version. Now we're going symphonic.

This time, we'll have a much bigger table with 32 brightly colored metronomes — a Mormon Tabernacle Choir of metronomes — all misaligned. It will take two minutes for most of them to fall into line. But there's one gloriously stubborn metronome in the second row on the extreme right that fights the mob and won't conform. In fact, it cleverly chooses to follow the beat but in exactly the wrong direction. I thought maybe it would be allowed to stay that way, a Minority Of One ... persisting against the tide, but ... well ... you'll see ...

They once made a movie about that stubborn metronome. It was called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the metronome was played by Jack Nicholson.

This being Commencement Time, I'd like to share this gently dramatized version of David Foster Wallace's 2005 address to the graduates of Kenyon College, in which he makes the argument that when you are dog-tired, stuck in traffic, waiting in the supermarket line, when everything is flat, dull, empty, purposeless, this is where being educated helps. Because you went to college and learned different ways to think about things, you have the muscles. You exercised them at school. You can stand in that supermarket line, surrounded by irritating, equally bored people, and if you want, you can imagine them beautiful or gentle or helpless — even if they're not. You have the choice. Your education gives you the option to see things from several perspectives. You can call it delusional. Or you can call it hope. Or you can call it a form of pain relief from your own pain. Whatever you call it, with it, you are unshackled. That's what a college education can give you, says David — a chance to fly free.

This video was created by the design team at The Glossary, (a "fine purveyor of stimulating videograms") in Los Angeles. You can find them here.

Ah, if only all summers could be like June, July and August 1740 — when three young guys (and a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old) did a science experiment that startled the world. In those days, you could do biology without a fancy diploma. More people could play.

That spring, the hot book — the one everyone was reading — was a gorgeously illustrated volume about insects by the French naturalist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. It was called Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire des Insects and in it, Réaumur mentioned that in all his years looking at bugs — and he was a very good looker — he had never seen a male aphid.

Babies Without Sex? Is It Possible?

"Where are they?" he wondered. Female aphids you find everywhere, on the undersides of leaves, on branches, on any number of plants. But males? Never.

Consequently, Réaumur said he had never seen the act of "aphid coupling." Could it be that aphids are extremely discreet, or maybe, just maybe, they can reproduce without sex! With the biblical exception of the Virgin Birth, sex was considered the universal method of reproduction. But, Réaumur wondered, what if it isn't?

Réaumur, in his book, said he had tried to figure out how aphids reproduce but didn't have the time to do it right. Instead, he invited his readers to take the lead. And in the spring of 1740, one of those readers, a 20-year-old law student in Switzerland named Charles Bonnet wrote Réaumur to say he was going to give it a try.

The Virginal Aphid Experiment

The plan was to get a female who had never ever had any contact with a male — a Total Virgin — watch it very closely, and see what happens.

To do that, Charles took a newborn female aphid from its mother immediately after its birth — before it could be exposed to any other aphids — and put it in an isolation chamber (on a plant leaf stuck into a container of water, inside an overturned glass jar) like this ...

... Then he watched from early in the morning — 4 or 5 o'clock — all day long till 9 or 10 at night, for 12 days, keeping his eye on his female "little prisoner" to make absolutely sure no insect — and definitely no male aphid — could make contact.

The baby female, meanwhile, nourished by the green spindle tree leaves in the glass tank, grew, molted, ate more, grew more, then molted again. Using a magnifying glass to watch, Charles Bonnet worried that she might slip from the leaf down into the pot and disappear in the soil below — but she held on, reached sexual maturity without ever having met, seen or in any way encountered a male aphid. And yet, amazingly, on the evening of June 1, 1740, at 7:30 p.m., this little lady gave birth to a brand new baby. A female. Charles Bonnet saw her do it.

Then over the next 21 days, she delivered 94 more. How she did it, Bonnet could not say, but that she did it, was unarguable.

Here are his lab notes, listing each of the 95 births. ("Pucerons" or "puc" are aphids. He put asterisks alongside births he didn't actually see.)

Charles Bonnet then sent these notes, his findings and a cover letter on to Réaumur in Paris, who, enormously pleased with the discovery, read Bonnet's letter in July to the assembled members of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The next step, clearly, was to repeat the experiment, to see if another virgin would produce another batch of babies.

Bonnet had two young friends, 34-year-old Pierre Lyonet, (a lawyer at the Hague) and 30-year-old Abraham Trembley, a private tutor in Holland. Each was an avid insect collector and a big fan of Réaumur and his book. So at Réaumur request, they agreed, each of them, to repeat the experiment: to catch a baby aphid, isolate it and see if it reproduced.

The Bentinck Boys Join In

As it happens, Abraham Trembley, the tutor, was spending that summer on a vast estate in Holland, not too far from the Hague — home to enormous gardens, lots of insects, including a great many aphids — plus two little boys.

One of them, Antoine Bentinck, was 6 years old. Jean, his younger brother, was 3. Abraham, their tutor, taught them to read, write and hunt for insects. Their parents, Count and Countess Bentinck were squabbling that summer. She had run off with a lover to Germany. He was suing her for divorce. Neither had time for the boys, so Abraham was more or less their parent that summer, and when he signed up to do the aphid experiment, he told the Bentinck boys they were going to help do it with him, telling them, writes author Rebecca Stott, "that they were now engaged in a serious investigation that might put their names into the annals of science."

So Abraham and the boys found another just-born aphid, put her in a similar jar, watched her grow, molt, reach maturity, watched her night and day, and the Bentinck aphid, like the Bonnet aphid (and, eventually, like the aphid from a third experiment, the Lyonet aphid), all produced babies.

"The Law Of Coupling Is Not A General Law"

When word of their findings got to Paris in August 1740, Réaumur sent his young (and very young) colleagues a letter of congratulations. "These are assuredly observations of great importance in natural history," Réaumur wrote Charles Bonnett, "since they each show us that the law of coupling is not a general law."

This little gang of amateurs had together toppled "one of the central premises of 18th-century science," says Rebecca Stott, "the belief in the universality of sexual reproduction." They had just discovered parthenogenesis, the ability to reproduce without sex.

Show Me The Daddy!

For a while, skeptics insisted that the baby aphids had been impregnated in earlier generations and that fertile embryos had somehow been passed from mothers to daughters. The following summer, in July 1741, Charles Bonnet raised a series of virgin aphids for five generations, and all of them successfully produced offspring. The next summer, in 1742, he ran the experiment for nine generations, and still they produced babies. This, it seemed clear, is something aphid females can do.

So what about Réaumur first question, the one about the missing dads? Where are the male aphids?

They show up. Charles Bonnet saw one — but not in Spring. When the days get short and the weather turns cold, female aphids begin producing males, who do what they're supposed to — mate with the females. And their eggs (in springtime, aphids produce live births; in fall, eggs) are stored over the winter until it's time to reproduce again.

When Bonnet saw his first male, he wrote his tutor friend Abraham Trembley to say that it was roaring sexual, "perhaps one of the most ardent that there is in nature. It appears to me that it does nothing except have intercourse as soon as they day arrives."

Making up for lost time, one supposes. You know, as Bonnet might have said, "guys."

I read this story in Rebecca Stott's book Darwin's Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution. You can also learn more details here.

Solved! A bee-buzzing, honey-licking 2,000-year-old mystery that begins here, with this beehive. Look at the honeycomb in the photo and ask yourself: (I know you've been wondering this all your life, but have been too shy to ask out loud ... ) Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon?

Bees, after all, could build honeycombs from rectangles or squares or triangles ...

But for some reason, bees choose hexagons. Always hexagons.

And not just your basic six-sided hexagon. They like "perfect" hexagons, meaning all six sides are of equal length. They go for the jewelers' version — precise, just so. Why?

Well, this is a very old question. More than 2,000 years ago, in 36 B.C., a Roman soldier/scholar/writer, Marcus Terentius Varro, proposed an answer, which ever since has been called "The Honeybee Conjecture." Varro thought there might be a deep reason for this bee behavior. Maybe a honeycomb built of hexagons can hold more honey. Maybe hexagons require less building wax. Maybe there's a hidden logic here.

I like this idea — that below the flux, the chaos of everyday life there might be elegant reasons for what we see. "The Honeybee Conjecture" is an example of mathematics unlocking a mystery of nature, so here, with help from physicist/writer Alan Lightman, (who recently wrote about this in Orion Magazine) is Varro's hunch.

The Essential Honeycomb

Honeycombs, we all know, store honey. Honey is obviously valuable to bees. It feeds their young. It sustains the hive. It makes the wax that holds the honeycomb together. It takes thousands and thousands of bee hours, tens of thousands of flights across the meadow, to gather nectar from flower after flower after flower, so it's reasonable to suppose that back at the hive, bees want a tight, secure storage structure that is as simple to build as possible.

So how to build it? Well, suppose you start your honeycomb with a cell like this ... a totally random shape, no equal sides, just a squiggle ...

If you start this way, what will your next cell look like? Well, you don't want big gaps between cells. You want the structure tight. So the next cell will have to be customized to cling to the first, like this ...

And the third cell, once again, will have to be designed to fit the first two. Each cell would be a little different, and that means, says Alan Lightman ...

... this method of constructing a honeycomb would require that the worker bees work sequentially, one at a time, first making once cell, then fitting the next cell to that, and so on.

But that's not the bee way. Look at any YouTube version of bees building a honeycomb, says Alan, and you won't see a lot of bees lounging about, waiting for their turn to build a cell. Instead, everybody's working. They do this collectively, simultaneously and constantly.

So a "squiggle cell plan" creates idle bees. It wastes time. For bees to assemble a honeycomb the way bees actually do it, it's simpler for each cell to be exactly the same. If the sides are all equal — "perfectly" hexagonal — every cell fits tight with every other cell. Everybody can pitch in. That way, a honeycomb is basically an easy jigsaw puzzle. All the parts fit.

OK, that explains why honeycomb cells are same-sized. But back to our first question: Why the preference for hexagons? Is there something special about a six-sided shape?

Some shapes you know right away aren't good. A honeycomb built from spheres would have little spaces between each unit ...

... creating gaps that would need extra wax for patching. So you can see why a honeycomb built from spheres wouldn't be ideal. Pentagons, octagons also produce gaps. What's better?

"It is a mathematical truth," Lightman writes, "that there are only three geometrical figures with equal sides that can fit together on a flat surface without leaving gaps: equilateral triangles, squares and hexagons."

So which to choose? The triangle? The square? Or the hexagon? Which one is best? Here's where our Roman, Marcus Terentius Varro made his great contribution. His "conjecture" — and that's what it was, a mathematical guess — proposed that a structure built from hexagons is probably a wee bit more compact than a structure built from squares or triangles. A hexagonal honeycomb, he thought, would have "the smallest total perimeter." He couldn't prove it mathematically, but that's what he thought.

Compactness matters. The more compact your structure, the less wax you need to construct the honeycomb. Wax is expensive. A bee must consume about eight ounces of honey to produce a single ounce of wax. So if you are watching your wax bill, you want the most compact building plan you can find.

And guess what?

Two thousand thirty-five years after Marcus Terentius Varro proposed his conjecture, a mathematician at the University of Michigan, Thomas Hales, solved the riddle. It turns out, Varro was right. A hexagonal structure is indeed more compact. In 1999, Hales produced a mathematical proof that said so.

As the ancient Greeks suspected, as Varro claimed, as bee lovers have always thought, as Charles Darwin himself once wrote, the honeycomb is a masterpiece of engineering. It is "absolutely perfect in economizing labor and wax."

The bees, presumably, shrugged. As Alan Lightman says, "They knew it was true all along."

Alan Lightman's essay "The Symmetrical Universe," originally published in Orion Magazine, will be included in his new book The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew to be published early next year. I also recommend Ivars Peterson's essay in Science News, The Honeycomb Conjecture.

A few nights ago, (Wednesday, I think, around midnight), I was by my window looking up, and there, hanging in the sky, I saw the moon. Not all of it, just what the almanac used to call "a crescent" — what my mom called a "toenail moon." The whole moon, I knew, was up there, hidden in shadow. The crescent part was facing the sun. That's the part you can see at the beginning of each month, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Elkins taught us, using a flashlight and a tennis ball to demonstrate the phases of the moon. Scotty Miller, I remember, got to hold the tennis ball. Mrs. Elkins, we believed, was infallible.

And yet, Mrs. Elkins never mentioned moon sweepers. I'm not sure why, since, as I say, she knew everything. Maybe she didn't think we were ready. Maybe they are a secret. They are a grandpa, a father and a boy. Their job, every month, is to produce the moon I saw this week in the sky. The "sunshine explanation" is, it seems, a cover story. Here, from the folks at Pixar, is the real deal.

What would it be like to be a string that made music? Not anything simple, like a guitar string or a cello string, but a magical string, a sine curve that's taut then loose, that doubles then doubles again, that sheds then dissolves into showers of notes — a flaming, sighing, looping, dissolving string. Curious?

That's what we've got here, from New York's School of Visual Arts grad student Daniel Sierra. This is his masters' thesis. This is music as you might imagine it in a magical laboratory under a magical microscope. Really close in.

Happy Weekend.

What you are about to see — and I'm not making this up — is a moth driving a car.

That's right. A silk moth — actually, 14 different male silk moths — each, in turn, hooked up to a robotic vehicle at Dr. Noriyasu Ando's lab at the University of Tokyo. Every one drove the vehicle to the intended target. If this were a driving test, all the moths would have passed.

The "engine," as you can see from this photo, was a rather large roller ball, looking like a computer mouse. From what I can understand from the science paper, it kind of was a computer mouse, a free-moving polystyrene ball. The moths would scramble, or dance, across the surface, moving the ball, which moved the vehicle. This is the first time I've heard of an insect running (or driving) a robot.

The problem is, they didn't know they were driving. They are moths, after all. What they thought they were doing was zeroing in on a lady moth. Dr. Ando procured a supply of moth perfume, the pheromone scent of an aroused female, placed it at the end of a tube, turned on a tiny fan and blew the scent at the male.

The male, wildly interested, headed for the source doing a mating dance that goes straight, then zigs, then zags, then makes a few turns then a full loop — all to impress his potential mate. Sensors in the two-wheeled vehicle detected the steps and turned them into electrical signals that steered the drive motors.

According to blogger Sebastian Anthony, writing for Wired.com:

In all, fourteen male silk moths were tested, and they all showed a scary aptitude for steering a robot. In the tests, the moths had to guide the robot toward a source of female sex pheromone. The researchers even introduced a turning bias — where one of the robot's motors is stronger than the other, causing it to veer to one side — and yet the moths still reached the target.

In this video, you can see a computer readout of two of the moths driving to the right place.

Thinking about all this from the moth's point of view, Dr. Ando has some explaining to do. Not only did he fill 14 male moths with false hope, but he also fastened them (lightly, perhaps) to a stick that pressed them to the ball.

His defense? He and his team want to better understand the moth's antennae and sensory motor system. These critters jump into action when they want sex; they do it extremely fast, faster than any machine, and they do it unerringly. If Dr. Ando can figure out how, he could make robots do it too, which might help in an emergency, when a robot, for example, has to instantly detect and locate the source of a chemical leak or a hidden biological weapon.

But, says Wired.com's Anthony, while robots modeled on moths are one way to go ...

Of course, another possibility is that we simply keep the moths. After all, why should we spend time and money on an artificial system when mother nature, as always, has already done the hard work for us? In much the same way that miners used canaries and border police use sniffer dogs, why shouldn't robots be controlled by insects? The silk moth is graced with perhaps the most sensitive olfactory system in the world. For now it might only be sensitive to not-so-useful scents like the female sex pheromone, but who's to say that genetic engineering won't allow for silk moths that can sniff out bombs or drugs or chemical spills?

I can imagine Bruce Willis, peering through a window, sweat trickling off his brow, his muscles tense as he catches a brief glimpse of a mysterious chemical seeping from a pipe inside Good Guy Headquarters. He smells nothing. Nobody does. But they dare not enter the room ... unless ... UNLESS ...

"Send in the silk moths," he says

Small vehicles purr into action. "We'll know in a moment," Bruce says.

Everybody relaxes.

Bit by bit, bot by bot, robots are slipping into the real world. Yes, they are born in science labs, but more and more, they're joining us outdoors, up in the sky as drones or spybots (looking like swifts swooping across a meadow), or swimming in the ocean (looking like sharks). These newborns are built to cope with what's out there. They're tough. They have to be because outdoors isn't like an MIT lab; it's got gullies, streams, weather and Things That Get In Your Way, like, for example, trees.

One of the toughest outdoor robots is the Defense Department's pack mule, a four-legged cargo-carrying thingy named (undeliciously) "LS3" for "legged squad support system" — that's an L followed by three S words. In the video below, a human gives it a verbal command, "follow tight," and you can watch it stir into obedience, rising on its four legs, following its master into the woods, where it's very "off-road," making its way around hundreds of randomly placed trees, which ain't easy ...

Sometimes, the world gets the better of "L" (my nickname for it), like when it tries to cross a gully and totally capsizes, doing a full roll, and then, apparently by itself, recovers and trots on. He's my guy. This video ends with him (or it) galloping, then trotting through a maze of containers meant to simulate a souk or a back alley. His real parents are the robotics team at Boston Dynamics.

If "L" is the hottest thing in tough outdoor robots, Salamandra is the wettest, driest and most adaptable. It is, say its inventors at the Biorobotics Laboratory in Lausanne, Switzerland, "one of the few robots, if not the only one, that can swim, crawl and walk."

Cut It, Slice It, Dice It, It 'Lives'

It comes in a variety of sizes and because each of its modules has its own microcontroller, battery and motor, you can step on it, slice it, split it and its various body parts would still walk.

In this video, we find it first in the lab swimming in water, then switching to "walking," turning its fins into legs. Next the scene switches, and we're back outdoors, this time heading through a leafy park to the shore of Lake Geneva, where the "salamander" (in this case guided by a remote operator, I think) works its way through the rack line of leaf and branches to the water's edge. A large swan is standing there, and when the salamander pulls near, it leans in a bit, as if wondering, "Hmmm. Is this something I need to worry about?" But, hey, whatever it is, it doesn't bother this swan. And off they go, both of them, into the lake.

All of which makes me wonder, if the world is soon going to be full of gizmos that look alive, zipping through the air, swimming, walking or maybe doing all three, will we know which is biotic and which is just tech? Will we care? The swan doesn't. But the swan doesn't know about privacy, spies, weapons disguised as animals, cargo, lawn care, bomb defusing, garbage collection or search-and-rescue missions after an earthquake. It's a swan after all.

I, for better or worse, am a human. Who worries, just a little.

For a closer look (with lots of videos) at Salamander robotica II, the newest edition of the "salamander" described above, you can find the science paper describing it right here. Crespi, A.; Karakasiliotis, K.; Guignard, A.; Ijspeert, A. J., "Salamandra Robotica II: An Amphibious Robot to Study Salamander-Like Swimming and Walking Gaits," IEEE Transactions on Robotics, vol. 29, no.2, pp.308-320, doi: 10.1109/TRO.2012.2234311

Correction: An earlier version of this post mislabeled the swans in the video as geese.

Some things you just count on. Like if we ever meet a space alien, it should have eyes (and maybe a head). Like somewhere out there, there are planets like ours. Like we have an ordinary solar system — "ordinary" because you know what it looks like ...

It's got a sun in the middle, little planets on the inside, bigger ones farther out. That's what most of them should look like, no?

We thought they should. In astronomy class (for any of us who took astronomy) they talked about a "frost line." That's a line, some distance from the sun, where it gets too cold to make rocky planets.

They said when a planetary system forms, the dust that's closer in, on the hot side of that line, melts into rocky minerals, forming solid balls, like Earth and Mars.

But farther out, on the frosty side, the dust stays gassy, mostly hydrogen compounds, swelling to gigantic size, like Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune.

Distance from the sun sculpts the neighborhood. That's why most planetary systems in the universe were supposed to look like us. Rocky planets in, gassy planets farther out.

Then we looked. And what did we discover?

Big gassy planets not where they should be. Instead of keeping their distance, and staying past the frost line, there are dozens and dozens of Jupiter-sized balls (big! really big!) tucked incredibly close to their star, squeezing so close, their "year," their orbit, lasts only a few Earth days. They are in tighter than Mercury.

Which means these once-cold planets are now, puzzlingly, hot. Astronomers call them "hot Jupiters," because temperatures at their cloud tops can sizzle at 1,000 degrees Celsius.

Or — and here's a pattern that shows up very often — you'll get not one, but two biggish Neptune-sized planets, like hungry twins, nuzzling together near their star. Very near.

Or we find a bunch of rocky planets — larger than Earth, but definitely rocky — gathered in tight formation around a star (with orbits that last 3.7 days! 10.9 days! Would you feel the whip, like a roller coaster?) and they come in alternating sizes — large, then small, then large again, then small, then large ... How odd.

As of this month, we've discovered 884 planets, 692 planetary systems, 132 of them with more than one planet and, strange to tell, almost none of them look like us.

"We are now beginning to understand that nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer [planetary] systems that have multiple planets with orbits of less than 100 days," says Steve Vogt, astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz. "This is quite unlike our own solar system, where there is nothing with an orbit inside that of Mercury. So our solar system is, in some sense, a bit of a freak and not the most typical kind of system that Nature cooks up."

All of sudden, we're the abnormal ones. We have to figure out why our solar system turned out different from all the others.

The newest explanation is that new planets don't stay put. They move. A gassy planet will form on the far side of the frost line, orbit for a while, and then gradually move inward, pulled in closer by the star. It stops only when the sun pushes back (via strong T Tauri winds that come with the start of nuclear fusion).

Did We Once Have A Big Sun-Snuggling Planet?

Maybe we once had a big gassy planet close to our sun, but it didn't survive. It became part of the Sun. Or maybe it got ejected — astronomers are finding emigrant planets, lonely orbs that wander the universe with no star, just drifting. Maybe one of those used to live here.

Or — maybe Saturn and the Sun played a gentle tug-of-war. There are computer simulations that suggest Saturn's gravitational tug kept Jupiter from sailing inwards, so the giants drifted a little closer — then stopped. The truth is, we don't know.

Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, wrote me that while everybody is busy hunting for an Earth-like planet, they missed this story. "Before we ever discovered any [planets outside the solar system] we thought we understood the formation of planetary systems pretty deeply." We had our frost line. We knew how solar systems formed. "It was a really beautiful theory," he says. "And, clearly, thoroughly wrong."

As the discoveries roll in, Mike is getting more and more uncomfortable. Though it will take a while to discover smaller planets, right now there's only one planetary system that looks a lot like our own, he says. "HD 13931 b is nearly perfect. What I would desperately like to know is whether or not it has the small rocky bodies on the inside too. But it'll be a long time before we can find that."

Meantime, he is trying to get used to the idea that we live on an unusual planet in an unusual solar system. That's two "unusuals." One more than he's used to. To live doubly-unusual, is to be luckier — and perhaps rarer — than we knew.

"It really is something that I find deeply weird," he writes. "What does it all mean? I don't know. I am certain that this single-minded emphasis on planets-in-habitable-zones is making people forget that there is still a lot of weird stuff happening out there and that we still don't even understand the basics of how we ourselves got here."

What in heaven's name is happening here?

We're in McGregor, Texas, surrounded by farms (and the ghost of Johnny Cash). There, on a launch pad, is a 10-story rocket ready to take off. Its engines ignite. Up it goes, higher, then higher, then higher still, until at 820 feet, something weird happens. It stops moving, hovers in the sky for about 15 seconds as if wondering what to do next. The wind is blowing, (you can see the smoke blowing off in one direction, so there's definitely a breeze up there) but it doesn't wobble, doesn't tilt, it just hangs there like a candle in the sky, and then, suddenly, it switches direction, and looking down, you can see it heading unerringly for a pinpoint spot on the ground below. It's going back to the exact spot where it began, hits its mark, "legs extended" and turns itself off, like a shy student going back to his seat in a classroom.

Why Build A Rocket That Goes Nowhere?

It's such an odd idea, a rocket ship that behaves like an elevator, an elevator, by the way, that doesn't go as high as the one they've got in the Empire State Building. What's being accomplished here?

Well, first off, this is a "student" rocket. It's practicing. On its first launch last year, it went up just eight feet; more recently it reached 262 feet, now 820, so it's doing better and better.

Second, it's a bottom stage booster. It's not the part of the rocket ship that goes into orbit; it's the part that gets things off the ground. In a normal launch, it would detach from the payload (and upper parts that might be carrying people) and either fall into the ocean and have to be retrieved, or drop down softened by a parachute to the ground, where it would be fetched and repaired. This one, as you've just seen, doesn't hurt itself. It just goes back home.

That's huge. Because rockets are exceedingly expensive. SpaceX, the private company that is building this booster (which they call "The Grasshopper") isn't sharing numbers, but while scanning the YouTube comment section, I learned that rockets like these can cost "about 60 million dollars." That's a pricey gizmo to keep dropping and repairing. To build one that doesn't need fetching and that's ready to go again as soon as you need it, must be an enormous money-saver.

What About The Extra Fuel?

It takes more fuel to power the booster to the ground. Up untill now, boosters just fall for free. What does it cost for the extra rocket fuel? SpaceX isn't saying, but common sense says when the rocket comes down, most of that fuel has been burned, so it is much, much lighter. I couldn't find any numbers, but I did find this bit of accounting from a self-described rocket engineer in the comments:

To put it in perspective, the cost of one of these rockets is about $60,000,000, and the total fuel cost for one trip is about $200,000. That means the cost of fuel is 0.3% of the vehicle.

Let's say you spread the vehicle cost over 100 launches in its working life (all LEO launches with 29,000lbs payloads) . That averages out to $20.76 per lb cargo (Space Shuttle was $8200 per lb).

If that's true, SpaceX is on its way to making routine space voyaging much cheaper. As for environmental costs, I worried a little about rocket exhaust. Burned rocket fuel throws off CO₂ and water vapor, I don't know how much, but on this second video, it looks like a lot. The underbelly view of the rocket rising and landing is pretty wild. Especially the elegant finish.

Curious Birds

Then there's that bird, the one you see in the first video about 11 seconds in, that swoops close for a look-see and then swooshes off. Maybe they should have loudspeakers at the launch site broadcast a couple of bangs to clear the flight zone.

The Neighbors

Local farmers, I figure, have to live with these launches; they might even love them. (I think I would. I imagine myself sitting in the living room and out the window there's a ten story object hanging in the air, slowly sinking down behind the cottonwoods. Most people have sunsets. I'd have rocket-sets, a rich roar followed by a deep quiet. I think I could get used to that.)

He's 26 years old, comes from Japan, plays baseball in Texas and can throw pitches like no one else in the game. He's Yu Darvish and he throws fastballs, sliders, slow curves. Facing him — and this is the thing that makes him bigger than baseball, just a stunning athlete — you'd have no idea what's coming, or when. He can throw a 96 mph fastball, pause, shuffle about, and then toss a piddly 64 mph slowball. Batters can't prepare. Most seem stunned. In this GIF, Drew Shepard captured five of his pitches from one game and superimposed them, so for the first time, you can literally see his athletic range.

What we've got here, says Shepard, is "a 97 mph 4 seam fastball" on top of "a 96 mph 2 seam fastball" on top of an "85 mph slider" on top of a "78 mph slider with a different grip that is more vertical" on top of a "64 mph slow curve." What's uncanny is he seems to release his balls at almost the exact same time. When you run these same pitches in reverse ...

... he looks like a kung fu fighter who can casually catch five spears and launch them back again without shifting arm angle or position. (That's partly because Shepard chose pitches that started at the same place on the mound; that's why he didn't include some of Darvish's very different pitches — cutters and splitters — because he throws them from a different spot.) Showing his full range would have made the image "too messy."

The coolest thing about all these GIFs, which were posted on Deadspin, and the various "time merge media" experiments now going on all over the Web, is we can now see what athletes are doing by dramatically collapsing or extending time.

Here, for example, (thank you, Jason Kottke) is a collapsed-time view of tennis player Roger Federer's serve. Like Darvish, Federer looks like he's making the same moves in the same way ... up goes the ball, up goes his racket, but watch what happens ...

Using "time merge media," we can watch different athletes hitting or throwing things with uncanny consistency masking astonishing inconsistency. We can also watch what they do in fraction-of-a-second sequences, kind of like watching a millipede in motion ... but in these images, each instant is frozen into a sculpture. Here time loses its flow, and becomes (in these images from Martin Hillpoltsteiner in Germany) a beautiful frozen pattern. This is a cheerleader ...

This is a break dancer ...

And this is a basketball player dribbling. You can follow the image with your eyes, right to left, and can see backward in time ...

Or, in this dazzling video, which plays with point of view, you can see time passing, from above, below or as a striptease, as each moment peels into the next. Check it out at MoFrames.net.

However you slice it, we are entering an era where we can spy on ourselves, observe our movements with ever increasing intimacy, learn secrets, see patterns, or just go ... "wow!"

You can read more about Martin Hilpoltstiener's computer program that breaks film into frozen sequences here. I have, of course, seen sports GIFs before — though never as revealing as the Yu Darvish one. Usually they make fun of silly moments, the most embarrassing being a Yankee baseball broadcast where an animated Spider-Man suddenly pops out of pitcher C.C. Sabathia's ... ummm ... backside. It was an unfortunately placed promo.

If you're old enough to remember the movie The Blob, starring a gelatinous, oozing menace that gooped its way across floors, slid under doors, attached itself to an exposed foot, hand, arm and then devoured its screaming victim without making even a swallowing sound ... If you liked The Blob, then feast your eyes on this: Joey Shanks' Killer Silly Putty ... It's real — and it eats magnets! (You don't have to watch the whole thing to get the idea ...)

Well, let's say it "swallows" magnets. What you have here is, in fact, Silly Putty, but doctored with a healthy sprinkling of mixed iron oxide powder. Iron, as you know, likes magnets. Iron and magnets attract. So when Joey Shanks who runs a production company in Chapel Hill was making this for Scott Lawson's YouTube Science and Engineering Channel he put a boron neodymium magnet next to the iron-rich Silly Putty. The magnet and the iron bits couldn't resist each other, and because Silly Putty is a fluid, it pretty much flows over the magnet and appears to "swallow it."

In real life, it does this rather slowly, taking a half hour, sometimes more, but Joey sped up the footage to create the illusion of a gelatinous monster devouring a hunk of metal (or in one poignant scene, an innocent happy-faced metal-boy).

What happens to the metal once it's inside the putty? Does it dissolve in a stew of putty digestive juices? No. Magnet lovers rest easy — it's in there, whole, like Jonah inside the whale.

Does it sink to the bottom? Or stay near an edge, "hoping" to escape? Turns out, according to blogger Phil Plait, astronomer, lecturer, writing for Slate, ("It's Alive! ALIIIVVVEEE") the magnet keeps moving, deeper and deeper into belly of the puttyish mass until it reaches equilibrium, until there's roughly the same amount of iron top, bottom, left and right, holding it in place:

The process continued until the magnet was in the center, because it's only then that the forces are balanced. Newton's Second Law of Motion states that an unbalanced force on a mass will cause it to accelerate (though in this case that acceleration is itself balanced by the viscosity of the Silly Putty, leaving very slow but constant motion; it's like terminal velocity). As long as there's more iron on one side of the magnet than the other, it'll move. So eventually it reached the center of mass of the putty wad and stopped.

Which is wonderful, because now you can imagine yourself, being pretty much iron-free, grabbing onto the putty, ripping it open, reaching in, and heroically rescuing the magnet from its horrible fate ... like the hunter who rescues Little Red Riding Hood and her Grandma by slicing open the Big Bad Wolf! This is a physics lesson where you get to be a superhero. Is there anything better?

Well, dark chocolate is better. But that's another post.

Update: Hey! Commenty people, I'm sorry some of you (well, one of you — "Captain Dave") don't like dark chocolate. No need to get persnickety, though, because in the end, you lose. Without dark chocolate, life is a pale thing. But since you are all wonderful, chocolate-loving or no, I thought I'd share this — which just happened. When NPR producer Linda Holmes (who you may know from NPR's Monkey See blog) saw this post, she realized that by some crazy chance she happened to have her own iron-rich Silly Putty and a magnet.

Why? Linda told my producer, Andrew Prince, that she got them from a TV company, but not being sure what to do with them, she kept them in a can magnetically attached to a metal file cabinet next to her desk. But on seeing the video, she thought, "Ah, that's what they're for!" So she pulled the magnet out of its Silly Putty wrapper and brought them separately to Andrew and here, freshly minted, is Andrew's version of the same experiment. This may not be as exciting for you as it is for us, but how often do you get to see something cool in a video and get to repeat it, with all the parts handed you for free — on the very same day? Life, sometimes, is just wonderful.

The dodo belongs to Andrew. It's extinct, I know, but it still loves dark chocolate.

You just don't know (because who's going to tell you?) that when you leave Earth, travel outside its gravitational reach, hundreds and hundreds of everyday things — stuff you've never had to think about — will change. Like ... oh, how about a wet washcloth?

Two high school students in Nova Scotia, Kendra Lemke and Meredith Faulkner, asked Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield (who is orbiting the planet right now) what it would be like to dip a washcloth in water (they suggested he clump it into a bottle, then pull it out) and squeeze it.

On Earth, a really wet washcloth, squeezed tight, will drip, right?

Up on the International Space Station, wet washcloths don't drip. What they do is like nothing I'd imagined.

(As a radio guy, I was SO aware of Chris's floating microphone. ... All these years, if I put a mike on my desk, it stays there. As much as I'd like to put a mike on nothing, I hadn't considered what a headache that would be. His mike won't stay put. Plus, Chris won't stay put. Who knew that the pull of the Earth is so radio-friendly?)

Thanks to Jason Kottke and his blog for noticing this.

Correction: Reader Fred Bortz and a few others in the comments below were right to point out a mistake in my blog post. I wrote that when astronauts "escape" the Earth's gravity strange things happen. As Fred pointed out, astronaut Chris Hadfield hasn't "escaped" the Earth's gravity. He's in orbit. Which means he is floating at close to zero gravity, or to be more technical about it, Chris, his microphone, his wet towel and the Space Station are falling back to Earth but never getting there, because the Earth is round and its surface curves away as the Space Station falls, so Chris keeps falling and falling and falling, endlessly. I wrote "escaped" in the nonsciencey sense, and since many of you are smarter than that, you deserve a better, more accurate descriptor. Sorry about that.

Some of us can't say no — and I'm using "us" in the broadest sense, to include not just humans, but wallabies, fruit flies, birds and monkeys. We can't control our appetites.

There are monkeys, Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, who "have a strong taste for tea, coffee, and spirituous liquors; [who] smoke tobacco with pleasure." And some of them, usually a small percentage, go too far. Here's Darwin's description of a group of monkeys waking up from a hard night of drinking.

On the following morning they were very cross and dismal; they held their aching heads with both hands, and wore a most pitiable expression: when beer or wine was offered them, they turned away with disgust, but relished the juice of lemons.

Modern examples are everywhere. This BBC video shows a bunch of monkeys hunting for refreshments at a hotel beach on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. They can, if they like, suck on daiquiris and mai tais or they can choose Fanta orange soda. There is, of course, variation, but as the narrator explains, monkey drinking roughly parallels human drinking. Some of us drink a little. Some of us a lot. And the heavy drinkers suffer similarly.

Drunk Worms

Some chemicals give pleasure. The problem is, in some of us, the natural urge for good times gets untamed. Then pleasure becomes a hunger that won't abate. "Alcohol can make male fruit flies hypersexual and pursue more same-sex mating, perhaps because the ethanol interferes with their reproductive signaling mechanisms," Dr. Barbara Natterson-Horowitz writes in her bestseller Zoobiquity. Even little worms get drunk. (They move more slowly and lay fewer eggs).

The book describes bighorn sheep in the Canadian Rockies who hunt for psychoactive lichen with such passion they "grind their teeth down to the gums scraping it off rocks. There are immature zebra fish, who when given a sprinkle of cocaine on one side of a fish tank, will stay on that [oh so promising] side for long periods, waiting for another fix."

Sick Or Slacker?

All animals are wired for pleasures that will lead them to reproduce, hunt for food, protect their young. The wiring is chemical and those chemicals are ancient. Humans have receptors for opiates in our brains, but so do insects, amphibians, and some of the Earth's oldest fish. And in every population, when the wiring gets overloaded, some animals can't get sober. Dr. Natterson-Horowitz says those animals are sick.

"These animal examples also challenge anyone who would stigmatize addicts or moralize about the disease," she writes. "What you might see as a personal failing in your no-account uncle who ruins every Thanksgiving with his drunken antics is not a uniquely human impulse."

True, but humans (I might argue) have reason, foresight and the ability to correct behavior we know is self-destructive. Other animals can't.

Dr. Natterson-Horowitz has this answer: "True, Uncle Bill can choose between a trip to the liquor store and a trip to his AA meeting. But if a fruit fly had the same option, it too, might sometimes take a rain check on sour coffee in a Styrofoam cup in favor of a warm, soothing hit of ethanol."

Yes, we have our weak moments. We all do. In non-human species, the problem seems a little bit sadder.

Case in point, she writes:

In Tasmania, a leading producer of medical opium, users sometimes sneak into the fields. Ignoring security cameras, they hop fences and gorge on poppy straw and sap. Dosed on the drug, they flail around in circles, damaging crops. Sometimes they pass out in the fields and have to be carried away in the morning. And there's no way to prosecute these trespassing scofflaws, no rehab to send them to. Because these freeloading opium eaters are wallabies.

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and her co-author Kathryn Bowers' book Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connection Between Human and Animal Health, takes a broad look at human and animal health; how what hurts and helps animals can shed light on our own medical problems.

This isn't finished. But it will be. Two residential towers, dense with trees, will have their official opening later this year in downtown Milan, Italy, near the Porta Garibaldi railroad station. (The image is not a photograph, but an architect's rendering. The towers are built and the trees are going in right now.) I love this. I think these towers are gorgeous. Milan is a very polluted town; these trees will cleanse the air, pumping out oxygen and greening the cityscape. I think cities one day could look like mountain vistas; I'm enthralled.

But I am not Tim De Chant, tree lover, blogger, critic, who says this won't work. All these trees, he thinks, are about to be dead. He recently posted an essay on his Per Square Mile blog, aimed at architects. He called it, "Can we please stop drawing trees on top of skyscrapers?" He thinks builders know squat about trees. I hope he's wrong.

The Milan project, called Bosco Verticale (or Vertical Forest), took years to plan. The architects say they consulted with botanists, chose plants that could handle the height, the windy exposures, the Milanese summer heat and winter cold. The plants they selected were then "precultivated" (Genetically enhanced? They don't say.) to acclimate to their new high rise digs. There will be lots of them: 480 big and medium sized trees, 250 small trees, 11,000 cover plants and 5,000 shrubs. If they weren't stacked vertically, they'd occupy 2.5 acres of forest.

Tim, to be fair, is worried about trees on skyscrapers. These two towers, one 260 feet tall, the other 367, are tall, but not crazy tall. So maybe there's a chance they'll make it. Reading Tim's essay, though, makes me wonder.

Beware The Wind!

Wind, he writes, is a "formidable force" at higher elevations. "Ever seen trees on the top of a mountain? Their trunks bow away from the prevailing winds." The trees in the architects' drawings are "tall and graceful." Not a good sign. Also, he says trees in high places often have differently textured leaves, "by including tiny hairs ... which expand each leaf's surface area." Did the architects know about this? I hope so.

Beware The Winter! The Summer! The Lazy Gardener!

"Next let's add extreme heat and cold to the mix," he writes. "Extreme cold, well, we all know what that does. It can kill a plant, turning the water inside its cells into lethal, crystalline knives." Higher off the ground, when the wind is up, the cold may be too cruel to these plants. Not to mention, "How are these trees going to be watered and fertilized? Pruned? How will they be replaced? How often will they need to be replaced? As someone who grows bonsai, I can tell you that stressed plants require constant attention ... it's not easy."

I know, I know, this is new territory. We're bound to make mistakes. The first tries are going to disappoint, I suppose, but look at these towers! They are man-bushes sitting in the middle of concrete jungles. They remind me of those "finger mountains" you see in China, surprising concentrations of plant life, like Limestone Ladies with Green Hair.

So if Tim De Chant wants to poo-poo buildings like these, let him. I think the rest of us should get out our hankies and wave at each and every tree being hauled up to the seventh floor, tenth floor, twentieth floor in Milan, and wish them well. They are pioneers, new neighbors being asked to live with us in the sky. They'll take in the CO₂ and breathe out oxygen. We'll take in the oxygen and breathe out CO₂. We'll water them. They'll aerate us. It's a whole new neighborhood. Yes, we may stumble as we rise, but rise we shall. These towers in Milan will lead the way. Pardon my boosterism, but every time I look at the images at the top of this page, I want shout "Yes!"

(So I just did.)