Take Back the Night (A little music to set the mood, maestro.) In Love With The Darkness – Xandria It’s the International Year of Astronomy. What better time to turn out the lights? Those of you who have been hanging about the cantina for some time know that I grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, which …
Category Archive: sunday science
Jan 04 2009
Sunday Sensational Science
Scientists Play With Their Food It’s that time of the year when we’ve probably filled ourselves with more food than we could hold. Before the diet begins, let’s hold one last feast, courtesy of science. Scientists studying food have made our harvests more bountiful, our turkeys bigger, and are discovering new foods for us to …
Dec 28 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
Unsung Women of Science The history of science, you may have noticed, is dominated by men. When we’re pulling names of famous scientists from the tops of our heads, the vast majority are male: Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein. If women come up at all, it’s a paltry few: Madame Curie, of course. Perhaps Vera Rubin, …
Dec 21 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
Digging in the past. Archaeology is one of the most fascinating branches of science. Uncovering our buried history helps us make sense of who we are, how we thought, and can help us understand why civilizations rise and fall. Ancient cultures were beautiful, brutal, and just plain interesting. There have been several recent discoveries that …
Dec 14 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
Space Through Hubble’s Eyes Interacting Spiral Galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 The Hubble Space Telescope turned 18 this year. During its 18 years in orbit, it has returned spectacular images and expanded our knowledge of everything from the age of the universe to how planets form. Outstanding work for a telescope that nearly failed …
Dec 07 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
A Little Science With Your Fiction Everyone knows that what you read in a fantasy novel or see in a “science” fiction movie isn’t real science, but that doesn’t stop real scientists from playing “what if?” Popular fiction is an excellent vehicle for transporting science into minds that might otherwise never have bothered. And if …
Nov 30 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
To Mark the Passing of Events Sunday Sensational Science is over at Slobber and Spittle this week. Cujo359 has put together a fantastically beautiful article on clocks of all sorts, from the crudest clocks in stone to the most sensitive atomic models. I was grateful when he offered to let me filch it so that …
Nov 23 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
Mixing the science up with the opera Lab coats on Broadway – aside from mad scientists, when have we ever seen such a thing? Science is seen as useful, practical, often beautiful, but hardly an inspiration for librettos. But that’s changing. Darwin’s getting an opera-oratorio. Genetic science inspired a chamber opera. And now, a physicist …
Nov 16 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
A Cornucopia of Science No, it’s not quite Thanksgiving yet, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have an abundance of extraordinary science to be thankful for. Here are just a few of the wonders spilling from our horn of plenty. From afar, the first optical photos of an exoplanet After an eight-year quest for images, …
Nov 09 2008
Sunday Sensational Science
Science on the Web Back in the bad old days, when we had to walk barefoot to work uphill both ways in the snow, science could be hard to access. If you lived in a city, you might have been lucky enough to have science museums and planetariums to visit, and a large library that …
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