Turning on the most recent edition of Steve Mirsky’s Scientific American podcast, I was delighted to discover that the entire episode was devoted to an interview with Susan Ewing and her recently published book from Pegasus Books titled “Resurrecting the Shark; A Scientific Obsession and the Mavericks Who Solved the Mystery of a 270-Million-Year-Old Fossil.”
On the day this article is published, it will be exactly one month until the day of the 2017 North American Solar Eclipse; an event that is expected to cause tens of millions of people to stop what they are doing and turn their eyes (properly protected, it is hoped) skyward to witness one of […]
My dear Galileo,
Each evening for weeks now I have carried my telescope to the top of a nearby hill and pointed its 70mm objective lens toward the clearly visible bright dot in the sky that I have learned to identify as Jupiter. Bringing it into focus, its 17.5x magnification – more than your early 8x model but less than your eventual 20x one – shows me clearly that what I am seeing is not a star but a planet; a planet with tiny illuminated dots seemingly nearby it.
Whenever someone begins a sentence, “Can I ask you a question about butterflies?” the odds are good, particularly if I’m in North America at the time, that it is going to be a question about Monarchs. And there’s plenty of reasons for this. Even if Monarchs aren’t prominent among your local lepidoptera there is simply something about these vivid black-and-orange butterflies that has captured the popular imagination.