Rumors have been flying that paleontologist Robert (Ace) Hayprel has found dinosaur fossils that will revolutionize our views about how those creatures became extinct 65 million years ago.
Articles with Humor
US Department of Energy (Public Domain)
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.
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Get rich quick with an NTU
Any scientist who finds himself even marginally in the public eye becomes the recipient of assorted new theories of the universe from earnest natural philosophers who work outside of the mainstream of science.
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?
Richard Feynman, explaining a joke in 1964 (Public Domain)
Science fun, but rarely funny
Thirty years ago when I was a graduate student in physics at UCLA I used to occasionally go over to Caltech to hear Richard Feynman lecture on physics. Feynman, who died this past week at age 69, was famous even then, although his Nobel Prize was still a few years in the future. He was also a very funny man.
Photo by Linnaea Mallette (Public Domain)
Gullible gulls and roaring deer
It is time to present the First Annual Gullible Gull Award for the most bizarre scientific research of the past year involving experimentation with animals — experiments that Shakespeare might call “wondrous strange.”
In the space age, string still snarls
In one of H. G. Wells’ books a character asks for “a ball of string that won’t dissolve into a tangle.” Almost a century later, we have tamed the atom and sent a man to the moon, but balls of string still end up in jumbled knots.