In 1961, America was all about the mission. A directive that sounds simple was but was anything but. The Space Race between the USA and the USSR was on. Both sides were engaged in a game of technological Can You Top This? and the Russians were winning. Cold War America was held in the grip…
It’s a deceptively simple bit of wordcraft: you take the word “mortal,” stick a two letter prefix on it, and you get a word which raises a dizzying variety of possibility. Mortality is every bit as metaphysical a concept as the human race has managed to conceive. What is it to be alive? What does…
I know that this has almost nothing whatsoever to do with libraries, books, or anything else I generally deal with, but boy, it’s the coolest news story I’ve seen all week: New ‘Super-Earth’ Found in Space It’s orbiting a red dwarf star (Gliese 581) just about 20 light-years from us, it’s about half again the…
See, here’s the thing. The Human Genome Project is without doubt one of the most ambitious, important, and just plain brilliant ideas put forth by the science establishment ever. The guys over at the American Society for Microbiology explain why better than I can: With the help of new techniques and powerful computers, scientists have…
I don’t know Mark Hyman personally, nor have I read his book, but I do subscribe to his e-mail listserv and he seems to know what he’s talking about when I can follow his reasoning and the science behind it. At any rate, it’s just plain fun to read a MD ream the agriculture industry,…
I’m not seeing much reporting on what might be one of the most interesting (and alarming) medical stories of the year: scientists have recreated (under tightly controlled conditions) the 1918 Influena virus that killed anywhere from 50 million to 100 million people world wide, depending on who you listen to. The NY Times had this…
Secrets of the Mummy’s Medicine Chest The link leads to an article about the NYAM’s 4,00 year old medical papyrus ( officially the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, the oldest surving medical document in the world) which is now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their exhibit "The Art of Medicine…
Call me a grand total nerd if you must (Lord knows others have–and they’ve been right) but I think that the fact that Voyager 1 is now approaching the heliosheath–the beginning of interstellar space for you non-nerds–is hands down the most amazing science story since Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel figured out that there really…