Famous Scientists
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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
Rare Meteor Event Inspired Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass includes the poem "Year of Meteors, (1859-60)" in which he documents many events in those years—including the hanging of abolitionist John Brown and the election of Abraham Lincoln. He also includes descriptions of a comet and meteors:Nor the comet that came unannounc...
June 07, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
What Does an Eclipse Look Like from Space?
If you have no knowledge of how the Earth and Sun and Moon move, an eclipse is a scary thing. With no warning, the Sun goes black and your world turns dark. An eclipse, however, is really just the shadow of the Moon passing over the Earth, as seen in the above photo (a NASA image taken by an astron...
May 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
American Wines With Native Vines?
First it was pet turtles and now it’s wine grapes—I just can’t stop thinking about what it means to be native. The United States ferments 700 million gallons of wine each year, most of it from the sugary mash of Vitis vinifera, a grape species imported from the Old World. Yet North America boasts a...
May 20, 2010 |
By Brendan Borrell
Lost Soviet Reflector Found on the Moon
In "Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe" from the April issue of Smithsonian, writer Richard Panek describes an experiment that measures the distance between the Earth and the Moon:Twenty times a second, a laser high in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico aims a pulse of light at t...
April 28, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
UPDATED: The World's Worst Oil Spills
I've been thinking a lot lately about oil spills. At the beginning of the month, a Chinese freighter ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, grinding a couple miles coral into dust and leaking oil along the way. A couple of weeks ago came news of a new study showing that o...
April 27, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Little Ice Age Art
One of the most iconic images people conjure up when they think of the Netherlands of the past has to be ice skaters on canals. This painting, Ice Skating near a Village, appears in an exhibition (which closes July 5) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C of work by Dutch artist Hendric...
April 16, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
