Is Earth Alive?
By John Palka — Posted March 5, 2017
People across the ages have asked, what is life? How is it different from non-life? How are the two related? We have asked this question too, and now return to it in another framework.
Rumination
Our First Anniversary!
By John Palka — Posted November 20, 2016
The first posts on Nature’s Depths appeared on November 15th, 2015, almost exactly one year ago. It seems appropriate at this anniversary time to step back and take stock of the journey we have traveled on together.
What Is Life?
By John Palka — Posted May 15, 2016
What is the life that we work so hard to sustain? The answer is not at all simple, even from a strictly scientific point of view, so let us approach it in steps.
Friendship in Science
By John Palka — Posted April 3, 2016
Scientists have a reputation of being solitary and introverted, their labs functioning as isolated silos and their teams driven by competition. However, friendship and collaboration are at least as important, as are shared passions outside the world of science.
The Trees and I
By John Palka — Posted January 10, 2016
In the mid-1970s I had a remarkable experience while walking in ancient forests on the west side of the Cascade Mountains of Washington. . . I was grasping an essential truth that was based on familiar science (relating to genes), but the nature of the grasping had a quality that I was not able to put into words, and that, even if I could, a scientific journal would probably never allow to be published on its pages.
To See a World in a Grain of Sand
By John Palka — Posted November 15, 2015
To see a world in a grain of sand—to peer so deeply into the nature of any one thing that the riches of the Universe begin to be revealed—that to me is the essence of science as a quest. Not as a profession or a career, not as a niche in complex modern society, but as a quest for understanding one’s deepest nature… I hope that the words and pictures that you will find on these posts will convey some of the joy and exhilaration that I have found on my own quest to peer beneath the surface of the natural world.