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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
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
