Some Things Rich and Strange

In his fantasy masterpiece Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkein was in general consistent with real world astronomy when mentioning the...

Recently I've been reading about proposals to explain the " Dark Matter " phenomenon by modifying the law of gravity, as oppos...

How long did it take you to solve it? I'll tell you how I did in the comment section to avoid spoiling it for you.

Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft is a fantastic review, both for its breadth of coverage and the creepy way in w...

I just finished rereading Alison Weir 's great book "The Wars of the Roses" . Coincidentally, the article Perimortem trauma i...

The Osa Peninsula is a remote, biodiverse region of Costa Rica , home to Corcovado National Park . It's the site of the OSA EARS list...

There's a beautiful moving map of the wind for the United States at http://hint.fm/wind/ . This is the moving wind map during Hurricane ...

CREDIT: G. GRULLÓN/ SCIENCE The orange line shows where turtles actually belong in this part of the tree of life, the dashed lines indicat...

Harriet Dark is an art student here in Boston. You can see more of her haunting work at Harriet Dark Art .

Steven Pinker , a linguistics professor at Harvard and prolific author, has a provocative article at The New Republic web site, Science Is...

Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution is a 2013 book by Nathaniel Philbrick . It focuses heavily on Joseph Warren , a physician, poli...

Many reputable thinkers have had issues with quantum mechanics , notably Einstein , who said "God does not play dice with the universe...

This video is a test of selective attention, count how many times the players in white pass the basketball. Casual observers may miss the...

At Cosmography of the Local Universe there is a video showing the distribution and motion of the galaxies in our neighborhood. There is a...

In Einstein's 1917 paper “On the quantum theory of radiation” he introduced the concepts of stimulated and spontaneous emission of radi...

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. Blaise Pascal in Provincial Letters: Letter XVI; similar statements ...

I attended a talk by biographer Richard Holmes at the Radcliffe Institute here in Cambridge yesterday (5/22/2013): The Scientist Within : ...

I recently read A Palette of Particles , another fine book by the writer and physicist Jeremy Bernstein about the history of particle physi...

I'm currently reading The Variational Principles of Mechanics by Cornelius Lanczos , the fourth edition published in 1970. From the pre...

Sidney Regis has a photographic project called Silent Lights - it's beautiful! photo by Sidney Regis

NEAR(ER) installation preview from Charles Lindsay on Vimeo .

video by Mike Murphy

The Los Islotes sea lion colony, near La Paz, Baja California. Photos by Julian Bages. I didn't even know he was there! ...

Back in the 19th century it was observed that the orbit of Mercury deviated from the predication of Newton's law of gravity - the preces...

Is Algebra Necessary? Andrew Hacker , a political scientist writing in the New York Times, believes that too many students in high school ...

Intel recently announced a new instruction for randomness generation - RdSeed - to be available in future generations of Intel processors....

The Big Higgs Question by Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg in the New York Review of Books provides a history of the theory behind the H...

I recently read Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman.   He discusses evidence that we might have two...

A Labyrinth of Kingdoms: 10,000 Miles through Islamic Africa by Steve Kemper is a biography of the African explorer Heinrich Barth (1821–1...

Writing a satisfying sequel can't be easy. However George R. R. Martin managed to do it for me three times - the first three sequels t...

I heard that it's been there several years.

The Younger Dryas was a cold period about 12,000 years ago that lasted about a thousand years. The previous ice age had seemingly ended, b...

Fiona Apple is promoting a new album and her recent performance received a good review at the New York Times : Fiona Apple Returns to the ...

I just watched Luis Buñuel 's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Even I couldn't help noticing that the character Co...

I had the pleasure of lunch today at MIT's Experimental Study Group (ESG). The special guest was Walter Lewin a retired MIT astrophys...

There's a famous quotation attributed to the mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl : My work always tried to unite the true with the ...

Generating truly random numbers is actually quite tricky. Intel has announced that its next generation of computer chips, Ivy Bridge wil...

Giant Mantas are my favorite creatures of the sea, here's a photo one of my favorite encounters from 2010: photo by Sten Johansson I ju...

According to Issacson's biography of Franklin, Old Ben wasn't the only wit at the 1787 Constitutional Convention: A standing army is...

I just finished Walter Issacson 's highly entertaining biography of Benjamin Franklin . One month before his death at age 85, Franklin -...

There have been several periods in the history of this planet when all the continents have united in a single supercontinent. The most rece...

Can your girlfriend help chill you out before some stressful activity? It probably depends on whether you have the G allele of the rs53576 s...

Apparently there's a bar/box shaped concentration of stars in the center of our Milky Way galaxy . This central bar is oriented about 20...

Magma is melted rock, when it reaches the surface it's called lava . Magma comes from deep underground where it's much hotter, so...