What is the greatest scientific discovery of the 20th-century?
The Hubble Deep Field photograph • R. Williams (STScI), the Hubble Deep Field Team and NASA/ESA
A cross-section from the Visible Human Project • National Library of Medicine (Public Domain)
One male: sliced thin and digitized
Start with a male human cadaver.
The doomed star Eta Carinae • Jon Morse/NASA/STScI (Public Domain)
From terrible violence came the elements of life
Author Doris Lessing began her sci-fi chronicle of space with this dedication: “For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our home in Africa, watching the stars.”
A well-preserved fossil Scipionyx discovered in southern Italy • © Giovanni Dall'Orto
Out of the darkness
“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world,” wrote the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” • Image by New York Zoological Society (Public Domain)
The hand on the controls is survival
OK, OK already. A thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years could not produce the works of Shakespeare.
A SpaceX launch in June 2019, which carried a secondary payload of Celestis customer remains • Photo by SpaceX (CC0)
Hair-brained in space
Man’s quest for immortality knows no bounds of absurdity.
Drosophila melanogaster • Photo by Sanjay Acharya (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Lord of the flies
I opened the garbage bin under the sink to toss out a grapefruit rind. Out puffed a soft cloud of tiny insects.
Chilabothrus chrysogaster, one of several species of boa found in the Bahamas • Photo by R. G. Reynolds (Public Domain)
The great exterminator
This is a story about extinction — up close and personal.
Stromatolite formation in the Exumas, Bahamas • Photo by Vincent Poirier (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Survivors from an ancient time
Cryptozoology is the study of unexplained and alleged sightings of strange creatures not documented by standard zoology.
Photo by Taoh Nichols on Unsplash
Science sealed their fate
Two cultural threads from the ancient world came together during the European Renaissance.