Browsing: Blog

An amputation guide for surgeons from 1739The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library For amputees, it’s adding insult to injury. They’ve already lost pieces of themselves that they thought they could always count on, limbs that they first discovered while waving the chubby things in their cribs. Yet after that life-changing loss comes a new kind of suffering: […]

Galileo is the archetypal paradigm-busting scientist telling truth to hidebound authorities.Felix Parra: Galileo Demonstrating the New Astronomical Theories at the University of Padua, 1873. There’s a common trope in science in which a lone genius stands defiantly against a backward, close-minded establishment. Galileo’s Sun-centric astronomy vs. the Catholic Church; John Harrison’s longitude-revealing watch vs. the bigwigs […]

To try to understand what it might be like to be blind, think about how it “looks” behind your head.

Michael Lucid photographs samples found during the Multispecies Baseline Initiative (MBI).Ben Goldfarb In 2010, Michael Lucid, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish & Game, captured a surprise in a beer-baited gastropod trap—a slug that didn’t genetically resemble any of the ones he’d caught before. On a hunch, Lucid sent the mysterious invertebrate to […]

Still Life with Gastric PeptideMia Brownell My grandfather wasn’t a big farmer, but his small garden in Kentucky was a miracle. There was rhubarb, corn, and peppers a-plenty, but mostly I remember the tomatoes. He bred his own, saving the seeds of the best specimens every year. By the time he was getting well into […]

Imagine looking down through a microscope and seeing a big mass of bacterial cells, writhing in sync, churning in circles. You can almost hear a buzz of activity. The micron-sized organisms migrate across a plate of agar, gobbling up the nutrient-rich media, recalling the frenetic activity of bees in a hive. What you see through […]

We may not have realized it at the time, but during the 1990s, Hollywood movies were infiltrated by a new presence that outshined even the biggest screen stars: Images created on computers became the main draws for movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, The Matrix, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since then, […]

By the time of this launch of the space shuttle Discovery in 2009, NASA knew well the dangers of lightning to spacecraft. At the launch of Apollo 12, in 1969, they were in the dark.NASA On July 19, Russia launched a satellite designed to study the effects of microgravity on, among other living beings, geckos. […]

Turbulence in the wing vortex produced by an airplaneNASA Langley Research Center (NASA-LaRC) via Wikipedia In many of the times we encounter turbulence in our lives, it is preceded by a calmly worded warning from above. “Uh, folks, we may hit a few bumps,” a pilot announces over the plane’s PA system—or something to that […]