Michael Wenyon, with his collaborator Susan Gamble, is an artist-in-residence at MIT’s Haystack Radio Observatory in Westford, a place dotted with huge dish antennas that eavesdrop on radio frequency radiation washing through space.
The artists Susan Gamble and Michael Wenyon in 1989 • Photo by Boldstripe (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Detail from “Road with Cypress and Star” by Vincent van Gogh
Firing up the time machine
A lifelong sky watcher, I recently had the opportunity to watch the sky on the day of my birth, September 17, 1936, at the place of my birth, Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
Mother’s milk saves the world!
Hey, Tony baby, have I got a movie script for you.
Purple loosestrife • Photo by Garten Akademie (CC BY 3.0)
Still the best game in town
One person’s weed is another person’s miracle.
Budding scientists at play (Public Domain)
At play among the stars
Walking home from work, I passed a group a young boys playing ball in the street.
Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash
Learning to navigate in a sea of information
All summer we followed the Mars Pathfinder mission on the Internet. We saw the pictures and examined the data beamed backed from Mars, almost as quickly as they were available to the scientists at mission control.
The Mars Pathfinder landing site on Mars • NASA (Public Domain)
Learning to love cosmic mediocrity
Someday, maybe a century from now, tourists will drive down Martian Highway 27 between high-rimmed craters called Wahoo, Yuty, Shawnee, and Bled to a well-marked historical site at the mouth of the Ares Vallis where Mars Pathfinder touched down.
Ventry harbour, Ireland • Photo by Tom Raymo
The conflicts in preserving a heritage
Stand at the mountain pass between Dunquin and Ventry on the Dingle Peninsula in the west of Ireland and you can see essentially what young Maurice O’Sullivan saw more than 80 years ago.
Portrait of Samuel Johnson (1775) by Joshua Reynolds, which has become an internet meme centuries later
May the best meme win
We’ve all received those chain letters that describe wonderful things that have happened to people who kept the chain going.
Photo by Artem Podrez from Pexels
The beauty of science isn’t always abstract
OK, they’re young and gorgeous. No wonder University of Chicago dinosaur expert Paul Sereno and MIT computer scientist Pattie Maes were included in People magazine’s special issue on “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, 1997.”