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.”
Articles with 1998
The doomed star Eta Carinae • Jon Morse/NASA/STScI (Public Domain)
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.
Photo by Hello I'm Nik on Unsplash
The third culture
Kevin Kelly is executive editor of Wired magazine, the ultra-hip organ of the computer generation, known for its screaming graphics and esoteric nerd-speak.
Impact scar on Jupiter from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 • Image by HST/Judy Schmidt (CC BY 2.0)
Comets, stars, and rock ‘n roll
An e‑mail query from a young acquaintance: “One of my favorite songs in all of explored space is ‘Jupiter Crash’ by The Cure.”