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Brontosaurus - Out With the Old Skull, In With the New Skull
The rise and fall of "Brontosaurus" is one of my most favorite stories in all of paleontology. Fossil discoveries, academic arguments, evolutionary scenarios, museum politics and public perception all played into the long-running debate about a dinosaur that only ever existed in our imagination, ye...
November 08, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
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
Stegosaurus Week: Playing the Stegosaur Name Game
Measuring diversity in the fossil record can be a tricky task. Short of inventing time travel, there will be always be some uncertainty about how many species of dinosaur existed at any one place and time, and as we learn more about the fossil record it may turn out that what we once thought to be ...
September 17, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Stegosaurus Week: Tracking Cryptic Stegosaurs
The first trace of the plated, spiky stegosaurian dinosaurs was found in Early Cretaceous rock near Grahamstown, South Africa. Uncovered by W. G. Atherstone and A. G. Bain in 1845, the dinosaur was represented by a partial skull and several limb bones. The naturalists felt unqualified to study the...
September 15, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
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
In Southern Utah, a Hadrosaur Left Quite an Impression
When Charles H. Sternberg and his sons excavated one of the first hadrosaur mummies ever found, in the summer of 1908, it was a major discovery. For nearly a century naturalists and paleontologists could only imagine what a dinosaur's skin was like, but the Edmontosaurus the Sternbergs collected g...
September 03, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
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
The Mystery of the Missing Brontosaurus Head
A few weeks ago, someone decapitated the dinosaur standing outside Norman, Oklahoma's only Sinclair station. The sculpture—put in place five years ago and named "Dino"—was a beloved local landmark, and fortunately the head was eventually recovered. This wasn't the first time a dinosaur's head has ...
August 23, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
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
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
