Scholars
Leading intellectuals in the fields of history, philosophy and scienceSpain'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
Whatever Happened to Seismosaurus?
In 1991, paleontologist David Gillette announced that he had found the largest of the enormous sauropod dinosaurs. He called it Seismosaurus halli, and based on the parts of the skeleton that had been prepared at the time, Gillette believed Seismosaurus to be between 127 and 170 feet long! Even gia...
August 17, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush
Many visitors to natural history museums—especially children—come to see just one thing: dinosaurs. No major institution can be without a hall of enormous Jurassic and Cretaceous animals (with the smaller, lesser-known Triassic dinosaurs taking their places along the margins), but the American occu...
August 13, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Twenty Years of Tyrannosaurus Sue
Twenty years ago today, fossil hunter Sue Hendrickson discovered the dinosaur that now bears her name—the immense, 80 percent complete Tyrannosaurus rex called Sue. Arguably the most famous representative of the superstar of the dinosaur world, Sue is one of the most fantastic fossil discoveries ev...
August 12, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Organs Made to Order
It won't be long before surgeons routinely install replacement body parts created in the laboratory
August 2010 |
By Gretchen Vogel
Can Nanotechnology Save Lives?
Harvard professor and scientific genius George Whitesides believes that nanotechnology will change medicine as we know it
August 2010 |
By Michael Rosenwald
The End of the Red Deer River Dinosaur Expedition (For Now)
One month ago I wrote about the efforts of paleontologist Darren Tanke and crew to launch a dinosaur-hunting expedition along Alberta's Red Deer River using the same techniques employed by famous fossil collectors Barnum Brown and Charles H. Sternberg. That journey has now come to a premature end.A...
July 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
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
Hunting Dinosaurs by Boat
Between 1910 and 1916, during the second great dinosaur "bone rush" in North America, the famous fossil hunters Barnum Brown and Charles Sternberg engaged in a bit of friendly competition along the Red Deer River in Alberta, Canada. The areas along the banks, often inaccessible by land, were rich i...
June 21, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Leonardo da Vinci - Paleontology Pioneer
Although he’s been dead for nearly 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci is still remembered as the quintessential Renaissance man, a polymath whose curiosity and creativity ranged widely among the arts and sciences. One of his interests was the study of fossils. In a new paper in the journal Palaios, Andre...
June 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
When Diplodocus Invaded Europe
On July 4, 1899, the steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie finally got his Diplodocus. He had set his eye on this fossil prize in the fall of the previous year when the New York Journal ran a fanciful illustration of the giant dinosaur peeping into a 10th story skyscraper window, and after some initial disa...
June 09, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
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
Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex
There are at least two stories behind every dinosaur skeleton you see at a museum. There is the story of the animal itself, its life and evolution, but there is also the story of its discovery, and at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City many of the fossils on display attest to t...
May 11, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
The Dwarf Dinosaurs of Haţeg Island
For hundreds of years, people have been finding the remains of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Romania's Haţeg basin. The Cretaceous-age deposits are remnants of prehistoric islands that sported their own unique faunas, but in the days before fossils were recognized as being the remain...
May 07, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Bone-Hunter Biographies
Finding, excavating, preparing, studying and mounting dinosaur skeletons is hard work. We marvel at the articulated bones of these creatures in museums, and while each skeleton tells the story of the creature it once belonged to, there is also the story of its discovery. These stories are often jus...
May 04, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Q and A with Barron Hall, Veterinary Dentist
Root canals on cheetahs, lions and gorillas is just another day at the office for veterinary dentist Barron Hall
May 2010 |
By Megan Gambino
