X-37B Overshadowed in the past week by the launch of Artemis, NASA’s renewed moon mission, was another incredible space achievement, one cloaked in secrecy. In 1999, NASA commissioned Boeing to develop an “orbital vehicle.” Boeing designed the X-37 to be a scaled model of the Space Shuttle Orbiter. The orbiter is the part of the […]
Code Girls written by Alan R. In the years leading up to and during World War II, increasing usage of radio and telegraphic transmissions to send secret communications necessitated the need for ciphers to disseminate sensitive information, such as military planning and operations. As the ability of one force to crack the enemy’s codes
Do Fish Drink Water? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? –The Bridgekeeper Life, as we currently understand it, depends on water. Perhaps, somewhere in the universe, a form exists that does not require the liquid; but, on our pale, blue orb, anything alive needs dihydrogen monoxide to survive. You and I
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The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes “The sight that flashed into view…was one of the most amazing visions ever beheld by mortal eye. The whole valley as far as the eye could reach was full of hundreds, no thousands–literally tens of thousands–of smokes curling up from its fissured floor…It was as though all the
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Mount Edgecumbe Just over 100 miles south of Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park resides a stratovolcano known to the Tlingit as L’ux. The name means “to flash” or “blinking,” a fascinating moniker for a volcano, ostensibly because the Tlingit first encountered the mountain while it produced smoke or erupted. In an interesting etymological confluence, lux is
Life Finds a Way // Chapel Rock Nearly a year ago to the day, we published the 250th The Mountains Are Calling article. The topic that day was Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, a largely unknown, underrated wonder of the United States. I’ve had the fortune to visit the unit twice, both times touring the spectacular cliffs from a
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Transylvania and the Count In 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker unleashed Dracula upon the world. The titular Count was not the first vampire in literature – that trend extends at least to the first half of the 18th century – but he is the most famous. Because of Stoker, we have dozens of adaptations of his
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Gravity Hills If you’ve ever taken an extended, curvy driving tour through mountainous, rural America – Hatfield and McCoy country or deeply forested Oregon, perhaps – you might have encountered a sign much like this one: Mystery Hill in Blowing Rock, North Carolina Known as gravity hills, mystery hills, magnetic hills, mystery spots, and a slew of other catchy
Aye-Aye, Captain Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
The Countess of Lovelace The Hallowed Halls of Woman Crush Wednesday today garner a new occupant, in the form of one of history’s intriguing confluences of art and science. Few genealogies intersect in a more intriguing way than that of Ada Lovelace, an English mathematician revered by computer programmers. Born on 10 December 1815 in
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