Famous Scientists
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The Lost Naturalist: A 163-Year-Old Australian Mystery
When I was preparing to visit friends in Australia a few years ago, I read a book about all the ways the continent would kill you. The entry on scorpions, I remember, stood out because it said not to worry about them---their stings only hurt.I was reminded of this while reading a story from Austral...
March 24, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Marine Archaeologists Find Shipwreck Linked to Moby Dick
George Pollard Jr. was not a very lucky sea captain. In 1819, he became captain of the whaling ship Essex, out of Nantucket, Massachusetts, and headed for the Pacific Ocean. Just four days out, though, a storm struck and damaged the ship. Still, Pollard pressed on, rounding Cape Horn in January 182...
February 15, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
A Robot That Tells Jokes
The robot takeover steadily approaches: They're now figuring out humor. Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. student Heather Knight, who calls herself a "social roboticist," has created Data, an adorable robot who not only tells jokes but learns from the audience response and then adjusts its comedy routine. Data...
February 02, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Edgar Allan Poe and the World of Astronomy
I've read my share of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but I was nonetheless intrigued by a caption in an article in the latest Smithsonian special issue, Mysteries of the Universe. It read: "The hollow Earth theory inspired authors from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Edgar Allan Poe." I knew that Poe, l...
January 19, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Finding Science in the Art of Arcimboldo
On a recent trip to the National Gallery of Art, I stopped in to see the Arcimboldo exhibit, which we feature in the magazine this month. When I saw the images in print, I had been fascinated by their weirdness—the artist made faces and heads out of compilations of images of fruit, flowers, books o...
January 07, 2011 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Looking Forward to the International Year of Chemistry
The United Nations has dubbed 2011 the International Year of Chemistry, with the unifying theme "Chemistry—our life, our future."The goals of IYC2011 are to increase the public appreciation of chemistry in meeting world needs, to encourage interest in chemistry among young people, and to generate...
December 30, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Caroline Herschel: Assistant or Astronomer?
After a recent visit to the National Air and Space Museum's "Explore the Universe" exhibit, a local astronomy post-doc, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, wrote the following about one of the displays:magine my dismay when I got to the section about Caroline and William Herschel, a sister-brother team of a...
December 08, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Rare Science Books up for Auction Next Week
Are you having difficulty figuring out what to buy that special someone? Do you have $600,000 to $800,000 on hand? Well, then you can bid on a first edition of Galileo's Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger), which is just one lot in next week's auction "Beautiful Evidence: The Library of Edward Tuft...
November 22, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Replace the Kilogram!
Here's an easy question: What is a kilogram?A. 1000 gramsB. a standard unit of mass (often ignored in the United States)C. a platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a vault in Sèvres, FranceD. all of the aboveThe answer is D, of course. And that's a problem for the scientists in charge of the science of ...
November 03, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Georgian Planet: A Case of Clever Marketing
On March 31, 1781, William Herschel, a German musician and composer, looked through a homemade 7-foot-long telescope in his back garden in Bath, England and saw something odd. He thought it was a comet, but it didn't act quite like other comets. And when scientists of the time calculated the object...
October 26, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Anatomy of Renaissance Art
The Renaissance may be best known for its artworks: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and “David,” and Da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa" and "Vitruvian Man" have without a doubt shaped the course of art history. But a new exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, “The Body Inside and Out: Anatomical Literature and ...
October 18, 2010 |
By Jess Righthand
Julia Child and the Primordial Soup
Scientists don't yet know how life began here on Earth. Mineralogist Bob Hazen, who is profiled in the October issue of Smithsonian, thinks that rocks were key to the development of life. Reporter Helen Fields wrote:It’s the complexity of the hydrothermal vent environment—gushing hot water mixing w...
September 22, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Will U.K. Budget Cuts Undermine Science?
The British government has started an austerity drive and asked for all departments to prepare for funding cuts of 25 percent or more. This includes science. Researchers are talking about shutting down synchrotrons, cutting off U.K. participation in the Large Hadron Collider and losing an entire ge...
September 14, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Rare Copy of Audubon's Birds of America for Sale
John James Audubon's Birds of America holds the record as the world's most expensive book. Not to buy, but to publish. Audubon had to raise more than $115,000 in the early 1800s ($2 million in today's dollars) for a print run of the multi-volume, large (39 x 26 inches) work that contained 435 hand-...
September 10, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Calculus Diaries
Though I was a very good at math in school, I usually found the subject incredibly boring, so much so that I often slept through class (teachers didn't mind as long as I aced the exams). The one exception was a college math course for biologists that gave us real-world problems like figuring out th...
August 31, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Tornado That Saved Washington
On the night of August 24, 1814, British troops led by Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn marched on Washington, D.C. and set fire to most of the city. Dolley Madison famously saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington and a copy of the Declaration of Independence before she fled to nearb...
August 25, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Spain's Mercury Fountain
Grrlscientist posted this video, of a mercury fountain that can be found at the Fundació Joan Miró museum in Barcelona, last week and said "I think this is supposed to be art, but it’s kinda scary art, if you ask me."Humans have long been fascinated by this liquid metal, but it wasn't until 1866 th...
August 23, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Cholera, John Snow and the Grand Experiment
I started reading about cholera over the weekend after hearing that health officials had confirmed several cases of the disease among victims of the recent Pakistani floods. Cholera is a bacterial disease that produces diarrhea and vomiting; people with the disease can die within hours if they don'...
August 18, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
50 Years of Chimpanzee Discoveries at Gombe
Fifty years ago today, Jane Goodall arrived at Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve (now Gombe National Park) in Tanzania and began documenting the lives of the chimpanzees that lived there. When Goodall ended her fieldwork to advocate for the chimps and the environment in general, other researchers too...
July 14, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Painting With Penicillin: Alexander Fleming's Germ Art
The scientist created works of art using microbes, but did his artwork help lead him to his greatest discovery?
July 12, 2010 |
By Rob Dunn
