Forty-one years ago today [in 1953], James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper in the journal Nature announcing their discovery of the structure of DNA.
Articles from February 2021
Image by Mehmet Pinarci (CC BY 2.0)
A preserved street railway car at the Seashore Trolley Museum, Kennebunkport, Maine • Photo by Rene Schwietzke (CC BY 2.0)
Getting there not half the fun it once was
A few weeks ago, I noted the lack of a high-speed travel link between Boston and New York, and proposed several solutions, some serious, some whimsical.
Photo by Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash
Are you reading this, aliens?
Professor John Mack is going big time.
Photo by Lukas from Pexels
Life among the whatchamacallits
What is a fluglebinder? OK, it’s a trick question. There is no way you could know the answer unless you happened to see a Tom Cruise movie called “Cocktail.”
A Japanese bullet train • Photo by Fikri Rasyid on Unsplash
Is this any way to run a railroad?
Bostonians deserve better. They deserve a better way to travel to their bigger neighbor 200 miles away.
Photo by Ning Shi on Unsplash
Natty Bumppo’s early warning
“…the immense piles of snow that, by alternate thaws and frosts, and repeated storms, had obtained a firmness which threatened a tiresome durability.”
Photo by Matt Mech on Unsplash
Bumping down the information highway
Dear Mr. Computer, I’m thinking about buying a laptop computer.
The world's first nuclear reactor was within a pile of graphite bricks • (Public Domain)
Chicago, December 1942
Physicist Albert Wattenberg was poking about in the Chicago branch of the National Archives recently. He was looking for artifacts used by Enrico Fermi and his team of nuclear physicists in achieving the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction in a squash court under the University of Chicago’s football stadium in December 1942.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels
In defense of the dull and boring
This from a correspondent: “I suspect that science makes scientists happier than it does other people.”
Atelopus frogs pondering the universal mystery • Photo by Brian Gratwicke (CC BY 2.0)
What the other half wants
“Ah, women. What do they want?” asks GQ magazine on the cover of the February [1994] issue. The question has been on male minds at least since Valentine’s Day, one million B.C.