(August 9, 2018)
Don't think it's easy being a vampire. Apart from the mundane sunlight/holy wafer/cross-in-your-face/spike-through-your-heart issues, you've got to deal with the fact that blood is toxic. A few teaspoons won't hurt...
(July 26, 2018)
Sometimes topics for this column fall, unbidden, into my lap. Such was the case during our recent trip to Romania, where we'd booked a room in the heart of old...
(July 12, 2018)
Last time, we discussed how NASA's recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will spend the next two years surveying nearly the entire sky to search for planets...
(June 28, 2018)
Sitting in the cavernous nose of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA's TESS was launched on April 18 from Cape Canaveral. By the time you read this, TESS —Transiting Exoplanet...
(June 14, 2018)
Mention just about any scientific finding involving a chain of causation — anthropocentric global warming, monarch butterflies/milkweed destruction, fluoridation/fewer cavities ("Colorado Brown Stain," May 31) — and you'll hear...
(May 31, 2018)
It reads like the sort of detective yarn beloved by BBC viewers, except that instead of the one-hour format, this story took nearly 50 years to unravel. Chapter one began...
(May 17, 2018)
The New Age began, as far as I was concerned, in the spring of 1970. Fresh in the Americas, I was completely captivated by woo — the more some phenomenon...
(May 3, 2018)
The Shape of Water, an Oscar-winning romance between a latter-day Creature from the Black Lagoon and a mute cleaning lady, can be summed up in a word: bestiality. The stuff...
(April 19, 2018)
Frigate birds are a surprising study in contrasts. On the one hand, I admire them gliding effortlessly high overhead, following the updraft above a Pacific beach in southern Mexico. On...
(April 5, 2018)
They say — someone says — eating blueberries, salmon and avocados is good for the brain. So is solving puzzles. Here's your annual IQ-increasing set of teasers. Nothing too...
(March 22, 2018)
"... there must be extraterrestrial civilizations ... because the laws of nature that led to the development of life and intelligence on Earth must be the same as those prevailing...
(March 8, 2018)
"The mysterious Voynich manuscript has finally been decoded." — Ars Technica headline Sept. 8, 2017 And here we go again. Every two or three years, ever since the so-called Voynich...
(February 22, 2018)
Around the year 1180, an Indian mathematician, Bhaskara II, invented what is generally claimed to be the world's first perpetual motion machine. It was a vertical wheel with mercury-filled...
(February 8, 2018)
Adolphe Sax, were he alive today at age 203, probably wouldn't be surprised that Macklemore's 2012 hip hop hit "Thrift Shop" featured the saxophone because he designed it for versatility....
(January 25, 2018)
The last time I saw Bob Zubrin, at a conference of the Mars Society of which he's president, he was, as usual, passionately advocating for manned missions to Mars. "If...
