A [February 1990] issue of Science contained a photograph, made with an electron microscope, of a portion of DNA extracted from a single-celled organism called trypanosome.
Articles from May 2020
Image by Thomas Wensing (CC BY-SA 2.0)
1940s Analog Computing Machine • NASA (Public Domain)
We don’t know everything yet
Puttering about in the college library I came across a book published 50 years ago called Unsolved Problems of Science. The author is A.W. Haslett, a science popularizer who was widely read in the late 1930s.
Photo by Tom Raymo
Mrs. Dana’s guided tour
The first wildflowers of the spring are small, inconspicuously colored, and inclined to bashfulness. The wood anemone and starflower, two of my favorites, unfold their blossoms tentatively, as if testing the temper of the air. They hesitate in woody shadows, like young ballerinas waiting in the wings for some more-colorful prima donna to take the stage.
Part of the Cassini science team (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
The megamachine rolls on
Not long ago an article in the scientific journal “Physical Review Letters” listed 225 names under the title. That’s right, 225 authors for a three-page paper.
Erwin Schrödinger in 1933
The philandering physicist
In the year 1926, his annus mirablis, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger published four papers laying down the foundations of a new theory of nature, called wave mechanics.
The science All-Stars
The science All-Stars
Baily’s beads, Barr body, Beaufort wind scale, Bernoulli effect, Bessel function, Bessemer converter, Boolean algebra, Bose statistics, Brewster’s law. Some or all of these terms will be familiar to every scientist. But who were Baily, Barr, Beaufort, and the rest?
Artist's concept of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) • NASA (Public Domain)
Big boost for the Big Bang
The poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Castle Bravo nuclear test • US Department of Energy (Public Domain)
Nuclear winter survivors
Two stories in a [January 1990] issue of the journal Science ask us to consider the robustness of life.
Detail from “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee” by Ludolf Bakhuizen
A lost soul of science
When a hurricane devastated Britain in October 1987, the British Meteorological Office took a drubbing for not providing sufficient warning.
Photo by Tiia Monto (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Romantics and the real world
Every now and then a book comes along that captures the spirit of a deeply felt environmental issue.