Barry Evans

1 month ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

My wife, Louisa, and I recently found ourselves looking up at a statue comprised of 7,400 welded aluminum plates, the Winged Virgin of Panecillo Hill in Quito, Ecuador. It's the tallest aluminum statue in the world with a total height of 135 feet. Based on a 48-inch-tall wooden sculpture created in 1734, the Virgin was designed and built 50 years ago by Spanish sculptor Agustín de la Herrán Matorras in Spain, before being disassembled, shipped to Ecuador and reassembled on its base.

1 month ago | northcoastjournal.com | Barry Evans

"That good anchorite, who boasted of having been as far as the end of the world, said likewise, that he had been obliged to stoop low, on account of the joining of the sky and earth in that distant region."— Francois de la Mothe Le Vayer, 1662The lovely engraving of a pilgrim — having come to where the flat Earth meets the sky, peers through to the cosmos beyond — was originally popularized by Carl Jung in his fanciful book Flying Saucers, published in 1959.

1 month 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.

2 months 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.

2 months 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.