ALL POSTS

At 10:17 in the morning on June 17, 1929, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Zealand’s Murchison region, causing landslides that claimed seventeen lives, and sending seismic P-waves throughout the Earth’s interior, to be picked up by seismology stations scattered across the globe, including to a handful of outposts that, according to everything everybody knew about the inner structure of the Earth, should not have been able to detect the quake. For some, these results were

When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...

On a lonely stretch of Florida swamp road, in the year 1920, a model T Ford with no headlights and two hastily replaced tires is trying...

As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from the Sultan at Marrakesh, telling...

If you're a scientist, and you've lived long enough, there's a good chance that you'll see your life's work overwritten and forgotten in...

As the tide rolls out, a woman in a hardened bonnet and loose fitting clothes scrambles across the crumbling cliffs of Lyme Regis, a...

There is a special poetry in rocks available to a select few and utterly incomprehensible to absolutely everybody else. While...

When it comes to bones, immortality is far from a sure thing. We generally think that the road from bone to fossil is a straight-forward...

On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the deserts of Alamogordo, New Mexico. At the time, it...

Water is that great, terrible thing. Its chemical properties make it a magnificent solvent and coolant, which is wonderful if you’re...

This day, let us speak of a new type of hero, one whose life story is not told as a sum of new products invented and foisted upon an...