By Emily Cataneo/Undark

Animals as varied as sharks, salamanders, and duck-billed platypuses can detect electric fields around them, while some fish, including the South American knifefish and various species of African elephantfish, can actually generate unique, complex electric fields, which they use to communicate information about their social status, sex, and dominance position within their social group.
Could animals like these exist in space? On a celestial body with completely dark oceans, such as Saturn’s moon Enceladus, our notion of evolution would support this method of communication, leading us to believe that aliens on such a planet might concoct their language out of electric signals.
These are the kinds of musings that can help us postulate about alien life, according to The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal About Aliens – and Ourselves, by University of Cambridge zoologist Arik Kershenbaum.

Read More

Posted on April 13, 2021

By David Rutter

When I was 15 and thought myself a smart young man of letters, I read The Sun Also Rises. I knew then I would read everything that Ernest Hemingway wrote because you could not be serious and avoid him.
It was 1961. The summer when he died.
But then I decided I could avoid him.
No, I decided I had to put him aside. It was bittersweet, though likely the first adult decision of my life.
Those times and decisions came back to me this week during the six-hour PBS biographical special Hemingway.
If watching those 360 minutes does not illuminate both the hope and terrible fear of imitating Hemingway, nothing will.

Read More

Posted on April 8, 2021