More than half of scientific research contributes nothing to the growth of knowledge.
Science
Photo by veeterzy on Unsplash
German postcard, ca. 1900 (Public Domain)
On the side of the angels
One of my earliest memories is of an angel.
A modern reconstruction of the extinct dodo • Photo by Michael Coghlan (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Science walks on the wild side
Svelte dodos, cloned magnolias, pet rocks of venerable age, and buckyballs. In this season of lists, here is one more. Ten of the funkiest, funniest, and just plain foolish science stories of 1990. If nothing else, they prove science has a human face.
A physicist at play (Public Domain)
Scientists say what they do is work, but we know better
“Ants do not play.” That’s what Harvard entomologists Bert Holldobler and E. O. Wilson say in their monumental new work “The Ants.”
Unidentified victim (left) of the Tuskegee study • U.S. National Archives (Public Domain)
Look ahead, but don’t forget the shameful past
The story broke on July 26, 1972. Jean Heller of the Associated Press blew the whistle on what may be the most despicable episode of racism in the history of American science.
"An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump" (1768) by Joseph Wright of Derby
A cusp of history in a painting
On Thursday of this week [in 1990] the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York will open a show of the works of the 18th century painter Joseph Wright of Derby. The show had its origin at the Tate Gallery, London, and moved on to Paris before arriving here.
ASAP, what’s your acronym IQ?
“Science,” the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), chose PCR technology as the “major scientific development” (MSD) of 1989. Quick! For what is PCR an acronym?
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.
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.
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?