Barry Evans

2 weeks ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

About 2,400 years ago, Hippocrates, the so-called Father of Medicine, wrote about the curative and pain-killing properties of willow leaves. In particular, he recommended willow leaf tea to relieve the pain of women in childbirth. He was following a long tradition: Ancient Sumerian tablets had recommended willow leaves to treat rheumatoid arthritis, while the Egyptian "Ebers papyrus," dated to about 1550 B.C., suggests treating what we now call diabetes with myrtle leaves.

4 weeks ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Talk to a climate denier — someone who believes global warming has purely natural causes — and chances are you'll soon hear the phrase "Milankovitch cycles." These, not humans, are responsible for climate change, they'll say. Actually, this is what your regular climate denier will claim. In the extreme version, some of these benighted souls deny that Earth is actually warming, despite 19 of the last 20 years being the hottest on record.

1 month ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Don't blame me for the clickbait heading. Capitalizing on Dubya Bush's 2002 State of the Union address in which he singled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as Earth's baddies, cosmologists Kate Land and João Magueijo employed the same phrase three years later for the title of their scientificxpaper. In it, they described a spooky coincidence linking a 14-billion-year-old pattern in the universe with the plane of our planet's orbit around the sun.

1 month ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850.

2 months ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

Thirty minutes. That's all it took, 66 million years ago, to put the future on track for you to be reading this. Had the Manhattan-Island-size asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico arrived 30 minutes earlier or later, we wouldn't be around to unravel the consequences of that mighty collision. We know very little about that huge rock, other than it was rich in the element iridium.