On April 16, 1964, Frank Press had just returned from the site of a tsunami. Three weeks prior, an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.2—the highest ever recorded in North America—had struck the southern coast of Alaska. The four-minute-long quake shook hundreds of miles of seaside sediment loose. Alaska’s shores tumbled into underwater mudslides, taking whole villages with them. Suburban homes sank into the sludge. Pavement cracked. Backyard bomb shelters crumbled. 131 people died. And with just two earthquake monitoring stations’ worth of data to go on, the young expert in digital seismology was summoned to the scene to attempt to sort out what had happened. Full Article »

In which sense does the Universe make sense?

In the sense you sense a sense.

—Victor Weisskopf Full Article »

In 1960s America, television programs like The Six Million Dollar Man showed a world where biotechnology could make us nearly immortal. Kids were enamored by the premise of bionic limbs, thinking they were better than their own arms and legs. One child’s desire to amputate his legs and replace them with bionic ones drove his mother to write to Senator Edward Kennedy for advice. Full Article »

The straw-yellow dust is a nutritional juggernaut, rich in potassium (three times more than in the fresh plant), fiber, vitamin B6, and magnesium. In the 1980s Indian scientists even found that it cured ulcers. And yet, for over a century, scientists have tried, and mostly failed to get people to eat the dried, powdered fruit. Even body builders who routinely torture their taste buds with various concoctions won’t touch the stuff: Americans prefer their bananas fresh or not at all. Full Article »

Floating west of Bermuda on a clear day in 1959, a group of oceanographers noticed something odd. Henry Stommel, James Crease, and John Swallow, aboard the navy-hulled research ship Aries, had just deployed a swarm of oceanographic floats at different depths. Swallow had designed the floats and thought he knew what they would do: drift slowly north on leisurely currents believed to dominate the deep sea. Yet almost immediately, the floats began moving in every direction, clipping along at speeds ten times more than anticipated. Full Article »

In a recent Barbie ad, young girls step into professional roles such as neuroscience professor, veterinarian, and businesswoman. Titled “Imagine the Possibilities,” the commercial ends by telling girls “You Can Be Anything.” This may be a novel concept for Barbie, but it’s a decades-old message for the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), founded more than sixty years ago. Full Article »

At 4:20 AM on September 3, 1925, a colossal airship of aluminum, silk and helium—over two football fields long—floated over the quiet town of Caldwell, Ohio. Yet from his perch a third of a mile up, Lieutenant Commander Zachary Lansdowne was on edge. He’d been roused from sleep by his crew; the weather had gotten worse, sandwiching the dirigible between a nasty headwind from the south and brewing storms to the north. But he decided to stick to the plan, keeping her on a west-southwest line. There wasn’t any immediate threat, and besides, people all over the Midwest had anticipated the USS Shenandoah’s arrival for months. Changing course would disappoint the admiring crowds awaiting them. Full Article »

One afternoon in 1942, Randolph Major called John Clark Sheehan into his office. Major, the balding, self-effacing director of research at Merck Pharmaceuticals, was offering Sheehan his choice of research projects. Merck was looking into two interesting compounds: the steroid cortisone and the antibiotic penicillin. Sheehan said he was comfortable with steroid research, but Major interrupted him to say that Lewis Sarrett, a recent hire, was also qualified in this area.

Sheehan had heard of penicillin. “I knew that it was supposed to be a remarkable drug but very difficult to work with chemically,” he later recalled. This did not deter him. “If it is all right with you, Dr. Major, I’ll take the penicillin,” he said. At twenty-seven years old, Sheehan was about to begin the scientific mission that defined his career. Full Article »

Bert Little, host of the Science Reporter TV episode “Big Magnets,” looked into the camera in 1961 and gravely promised that soon MIT “will house the strongest magnets in the world.”

These magnets were co-designed by MIT professor Francis Bitter, who ironically was dwarfed by Little on camera. Bitter had founded MIT’s magnet laboratory over twenty years prior to his on-screen appearance, and for him it wasn’t just the strength of the magnet that mattered, it was also about how you used it. Bitter said magnets were a way to see the invisible; to him, they were the key to solving the “mystery of patterns beyond life.” And the funding climate, after a twenty-year lull, could not resist the attraction of deciphering those mysterious patterns. Full Article »