Science History

Italy as we know it today had not been such since the days of the Roman Empire. You can see that last remnant today in the existence of The Vatican smack in the middle of Rome but at one point they held a substantial amount of territory.  Like Americans, Italians are inherently rebellious. If you are on a plane flight and a flight attendant complains about someone smoking a cigarette, savvy travelers know it's an Italian in the bathroom. It is part of the reason Americans love Italian people. Unlike Americans, Italians had to fight not only each other for over a thousand years, they had…

Critics of scientists and science writers who speak plainly usually note it is better to be more neutral in tone, informational - 'show them some slides.' Yet very little actually gets done that way. A few places can stay in existence writing 'the universe is mysterious' articles but environmentalists know how to move the needle, financially, politically, and cultural. And it is not by being informational. Though their work is often hyperbole and misinformation around a kernel of scientific truth, they see positive results as the goal, not science. They sometimes win by convincing scientists…

Michael Barone of the Washington Examiner wrote an opinion piece so false in premises that it needs no formal logic to show the flaw only a brief Google search. He writes of the Manhattan project as some sort of a disproof of affirmative action and as an exemplar of who the best people for a job like atomic physics would be. The fact is that 10-20% of the overall workforce was Black to comply with labor equity laws that even existed at the federal level in the 1940’s and 12 of the lead scientist were Black, of which there were many more from just about every allied country.  Barone wrote…

Here are some interesting YouTube videos, from which I have learned quite a bit: Mushballs on Jupiter. Terrestrial meteorology is an intricate subject, so how about a planet which could be said to be largely made up of weather?  Here is an interesting video from an astrophysicist, in which I see details that are perhaps clearer to a (physical) chemist! Ammonia and water mix in Jupiter’s atmosphere to give some pretty epic lightning and giant hail that have been dubbed “mushballs”. I was a bit surprised when I heard her mention helium among the gases detectable on Jupiter by spectroscopy…

Can Christmas be about gender? Apparently so, if the paucity of female Santas is anything to go by. There have, in fact, been cases of Australian women donning the secular red and white Santa attire as far back as 1930 — and there is no reason why we couldn’t have more female Santas today. In 1935, Queensland’s Daily Mercury reported on aviator Nancy Bird Walton, “The Angel of the Outback”, piloting a female Santa Claus into the north-western corner of New South Wales. Daily Pictorial, Thursday 25 December 1930. Bird was a volunteer with the Far West Children’s Health Scheme,…

By Catherine Meyers, Inside Science  (Inside Science) -- If you’ve heard the name Rosalind Franklin, you’ve probably also heard the names James Watson and Francis Crick. Watson and Crick form the famous duo most widely credited with figuring out the spiral staircase shape of DNA, and Franklin’s public image has become inextricably linked to the story of how it all happened. In Watson’s rendition of the tale, which he published in the 1968 book “The Double Helix,” Franklin was belligerent, reluctant to collaborate, and struggled to interpret her own data. Watson commented on her looks…

Disney and Warner Bros. are losing a small fortune pushing back the dates of "Black Widow" and "Wonder Woman 1984" respectively. Yet they did it. Despite paying interest on $500 million in debt, they believe it will be better to change the date for theater release than sell their films directly. Movies, concerts, theater shows, etc. command a premium because they are communal. Anyone who has watched a filmed version of a Broadway show can tell you it's not the same. Yet Earth Day is refusing to change its date despite its paean to being a communal event - in numerous ways. The date is so…

On October 3 1849, the famed American horror and mystery author Edgar Allan Poe was found in a complete state of delirium – incoherent, dishevelled and wearing a stranger’s clothes. Four days later, he died in a hospital. His final words were “Lord, help my poor soul”. The nature of Poe’s untimely demise at the age of 40 remains a mystery today, having baffled scholars for over 170 years. Dozens of possible causes of death have been suggested — from rabies to syphilis. Some suggest Poe was victimized in a form of voter fraud known as a cooping scheme, in which gangs working for corrupt…

“Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.” – Marshall McLuhan* The famous media scholar’s statement about preliterate societies seems to apply also to our society today, in which the word “terror” appears in the news daily. When McLuhan’s oral society gains enough leisure to develop a written language, “leisure” would mean not simply a few hours off work, but also some insulation from the terrors of the interconnected world. Enough insulation so that one could safely turn one’s attention inward for a while, to direct one’s mind to…

Not long ago, I was watching a documentary The Pharaoh in the Suburb on Channel 5 (UK terrestrial television) which told us that The discovery of a gigantic statue in a suburb of Cairo shed light on an almost forgotten period of Egyptian history, and the accomplishments of one of the greatest pharaohs of all, Psamtik I, who reigned 664–610 BC. The statue was discovered in March 2017, and here he is after being excavated: The picture is taken from this article, which appeared a few months later, Two toes of King Psamtik I statue excavated in Matariya (Egypt Independent). Something of his…