Swans on Tea

ApolloPlus40 - Tweeting the Apollo 11 Mission
Nature News twitters the Apollo 11 moon mission as it happened — 40 years on. Followers can read about technical milestones, political challenges, and related events in the space race starting today, just over a month before the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing.
(Gliese 581 being a system, [...]

An interesting graph of life expectancy vs per-capita income, for a bunch of different countries around the world. What is so trés cool is that you can animate it to run it from 1800 to the present. France does a meteoric rise very early on with no change in income, war participants take [...]

Mysterious disappearance of explorer Everett Ruess solved after 75 years
The mysterious disappearance of Everett Ruess, a 20-year-old artist, writer and footloose explorer who wandered the Southwest in the early 1930s on a burro and who has become a folk hero to many, has been solved with the help of University of Colorado at Boulder researchers [...]

Until you do a CAT scan.
NYT: Autopsies of War Dead Reveal Ways to Save Others
Col. Howard T. Harcke, a 71-year-old Marine Corps radiologist who delayed retirement to read CT scans at Dover, noticed something peculiar in late 2005. The emergency treatment for a collapsed lung involves inserting a needle and tube into the chest [...]

‘Lone’ longitude genius may have had help
The story of John Harrison the “lone genius” who solved the problem of finding longitude at sea is in urgent need of a rewrite.
Discoveries made during repairs to Harrison’s first successful “sea clock” – completed in 1735 – suggest that others contributed to his pioneering timepieces. “Harrison is always [...]

Landmarks: Birth of Modern Electronics
In June 1948, the Physical Review published a description of a novel electronic device that “may be employed as an amplifier, oscillator, and for other purposes for which vacuum tubes are ordinarily used.” That statement hardly begins to capture the importance of the transistor, which made possible technology unimaginable at the [...]

Easy as α β γ ?
The brilliant young PhD student Ralph Alpher working with his advisor George Gamow were about to publish a major work about the origins of the elements after the Big Bang. In a burst of inspiration, Gamow invited the physicist Hans Bethe to include his name on the paper, even though [...]

On July 11, 1979, the space station Skylab re-entered the atmosphere, broke up and rained down over Western Australia and the Indian Ocean. (Ah, yes, I remember going to a Skylab-is-falling party) The Shire of Esperance fined NASA $400 for littering.
Littering fine paid
ALMOST 30 years after fining NASA for littering the [...]

Whale Fossil Found in Kitchen Counter
After a factory had found a 40-million-year-old whale fossil in a limestone kitchen counter, researchers investigated the stone’s fossil-packed Egyptian quarry, which could shed light on the origins of African wildlife.

Who Watches the Watchman?
Let’s say you own a big building full of valuable stuff. How do you make sure that the night watchman patrolling your factory floor or museum galleries after closing time actually makes his rounds? How do you know he’s inspecting every hallway, floor, and stairwell in the facility? How do you know [...]

Skulls in the Stars: Mr. Faraday goes wild — with atomic speculation! (1844)
There’s discussion of hard impenetrable spheres, but no, it’s not a “spring break” exposé. Just good old physics.

The 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission is still a few months away, but here’s the Apollo 11 image Library which has a lot of neat photos from the mission as well as documentation of the training, planning maps and PR pictures, too.