Awkward and angular looking, Apollo 17's lunar module Challenger was designed for flight in the near vacuum of space. Digitally enhanced and reprocessed, this picture taken from Apollo 17's command module America shows Challenger's ascent stage in lunar orbit. Small reaction control thrusters are at... Continue Reading →
Today marks Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Below is a transcript of his celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech, delivered on Aug. 28, 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. "I have a dream that one day on the... Continue Reading →
Stephen was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Galileo Galilei. His father, Frank Hawking, came from a family of tenant farmers in Yorkshire who suffered hard times during the agricultural depression at... Continue Reading →
Probably the most significent contribution that Galileo Galilei made to science was the discovery of the four satellites around Jupiter that are now named in his honor. Galileo first observed the moons of Jupiter on January 7, 1610 through a... Continue Reading →
Jacob Bernoulli (6 January 1655 - 16 August 1705) was a Swiss mathematician who was the first to use the term integral. He studied the catenary, the curve of a suspended string. He was an early user of polar coordinates and... Continue Reading →
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892– September 2, 1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specializing in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number... Continue Reading →
Isaac Asimov immigrated with his family from Russia to the United States and became a biochemistry professor while pursuing writing. He published his first novel, Pebble in the Sky, in 1950. An immensely prolific author who penned nearly 500 books, he... Continue Reading →
Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? Queen Elizabeth II became queen on February 6, 1952, and was crowned on June 2, 1953. She was the mother of Prince Charles, heir to the throne, as well as the grandmother of Princes William and Harry. As the... Continue Reading →
Tanks rolled into Ukraine unabated. Families packed into darkened subway stations to take shelter from bombs. Others filled suitcases and fled along clogged roadways out of cities. The images emerging from Ukraine evoke memories of 20th-century conflicts in Europe that once seemed unimaginable in 2022,... Continue Reading →
Scents of Science 