Originally posted on mrchair 2/17/2011.
The coincidence is not lost on me that the week I purchased a Kindle is the week Borders Books & Music — the big box version of a bookstore that I grew up on — filed bankruptcy and announced it would be closing 30% of its stores.
Nor do I take it lightly.
When I was an all-joints adolescent growing up in suburban Phoenix, Borders served as an entry point and an escape for me. In the same way media conglomerate Blockbuster introduced me to all the movies I’d never seen before (and my first job), so did the towering brick and mortar bookstore facilitate my introduction to the joys of reading, but also just spending time around books.
Read MoreOriginally published in The Arizona Daily Star, 2000.Tate Williams
An average patient for one Northwest Side hospital has gastrointestinal discomfort, needs immediate surgery, has a preference for standing upright and weighs upwards of 1,100 pounds.
Aside from the obvious, what sets Cortaro Equine Hospital apart from every other area clinic is that a case of gut pain sends Dr. Larry Shamis plunging into a couple hundred pounds of intestine to save a patient's life.
Read MoreOriginally published in the East Valley Tribune 2003.
Baseball legend Ted Williams' DNA is not missing from a Scottsdale cryonics company, and any damage to his body would be the result of regular procedures related to freezing a corpse for preservation, the company's director said Wednesday.
Carlos Mondragon, director of Alcor Life Extension Foundation, said during a news conference that a Sports Illustrated article claiming Williams' body is in poor condition stems from a disgruntled employee lashing out at the company.
Read MoreOriginally published in The Arizona Daily Star, 2000 Tate Williams
Stress muddles memories, according to a UA study that raises doubts about eyewitness testimony in criminal cases.
Results of a standard word-memory experiment suggest that stress increases the likelihood that people will remember hearing words they actually did not hear. The participants in the study tended to remember the general themes of the words they had heard but confuse the details.
"Be really careful on not depending on the details," said Lynn Nadel, head of the University of Arizona psychology department and co-author of the study with graduate student Jessica Payne.
Read MoreOriginally published in The Arizona Daily Star, 2000. Tate Williams
Three dimensions, most people understand. Height, width and depth.
Add a fourth - time, as in three-dimensional objects moving through time.
But a fifth?
Scientists have thought for years that dimensions exist beyond our perception but assumed they were so far out of reach that further investigation would be futile.
Read MoreOriginally published in The Arizona Daily Star, 2000.
Research scientists are using middens - material encased in ancient rodent urine - to chart thousands of years of climate evolution
Tate Williams
Local researchers have compiled a detailed 22,000-year history of climate change in one of the world's driest deserts by dating fossilized rodent middens.
Scientists from the University of Arizona and the U.S. Geological Survey on Tumamoc Hill examined the middens - clods of vegetation preserved in crystallized rodent urine - along with preserved deposits from dried springs. They used them to create a detailed record of climate change in the hyperarid Atacama Desert in Chile.
Read MoreOriginally published in The Arizona Daily Star, 2000.
Tucsonans to lead 2 probes' photo flyby
Tate Williams
Tucson scientists are in charge of capturing images of Jupiter as two robotic spacecraft converge at the planet this month for the first time in history.
As the veteran Galileo spacecraft spends its last years orbiting around Jupiter and the newcomer Cassini spacecraft darts past the giant planet, the two are performing several experiments and snapping thousands of images that will be analyzed by local scientists.
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