Category: Blog

Scientists have discovered soft tissue preserved in a Tyrannosaurus rex fossil bone. Amazing!

Following in the footprints of the X-Prize, NASA has announced its first Centennial Challenges. The Tether Challenge calls on inventors to create a material light enough and strong enough to be part of space elevators. The Beam Power Challenge is designed to encourage inventors to find a way to wirelessly beam a robot enough power …

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Oh, great, I’m writing a book on genetics, and those darn scientists are rewriting the basic laws of inheritance. Can’t they just leave well enough alone? At least until the book is published? (Which may be never, if I don’t pick up the pace…)

A Boston University research team has found evidence that naturally high level of blood cholesterol lead to better mental functioning. At least, right up until you drop dead of a heart attack.

Remember when I blogged about the time the Japanese bombed Saskatchewan? Here’s a story about another wartime Japanese scheme–to drop rats and insects infected with bubonic plague, cholera, typhus and other diseases on U.S. cities, using submarine-borne bombers. Seems they’ve found one of the subs. (Nothing ever came of the plan.)

These spoofs of romance novel covers are hilarious.

I start rehearsals this morning for Globe Theatre‘s upcoming production of Twelfth Night, so blogging will be nonexistant during the day and lighter than usual for the next few weeks. But I won’t go away completely…

One of the futuristic inventions of the Star Trek universe is the replicator, a device that can make just about anything: such as “Tea, Earl Gray, Hot.” Replicators aren’t in the offing, but the next best thing is: a self-copying rapid prototyping machine. The idea of a machine that can make a variety of objects, …

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I’m not sure I understand this, which says light as we know it may be a direct result of small violations of relativity, but it sure sounds cool.

Remember those invasions of giant ants triggered by nuclear testing in the 1950s, chronicled in classic documentaries like Them? Now global warming threatens invasions of…smaller-than normal ants. But what they lack in size, they’ll make up for in quantity.

NASA is using high-tech sensors to develop human-shaped robot astronauts called Robonauts.

Have you heard of Ward Churchill? Count yourself lucky if you haven’t. For some reason, he was invited to speak in North Battleford on Saturday. (Yes, yes, I know, second anniversary of the beginning of Iraq War–what I mean is, I don’t understand the reason for inviting someone whose views are the intellectual equivalent of, …

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