Bizarre

The Army Ant Death Spiral

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series William Beebe

The Army Ant Death Spiral   Renowned ecologist and conservationist William Beebe’s 1921 tome, Edge of the Jungle, chronicled an incredible event in the teeming forests of Kartabo in Guyana. In the recorded history of entomology, no human had witnessed anything like it. He wrote: Yet, whatever the simile, the net of unconscious precedent is

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Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator

Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator The Large Hadron Collider, operated by CERN, the famed European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world’s biggest particle accelerator. Also known as “atom smashers” or “supercolliders,” accelerators are massive machines that use electromagnetic fields to launch particles at extraordinarily high speeds, usually near the speed of light. Particle

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2020: A Utah Odyssey

2020: A Utah Odyssey Certainly one of the greatest science-fiction films of all time and one of the best films of any genre is Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Much of the credit, of course, goes to Arthur C. Clarke, the seminal writer whose short story The Sentinel inspired the film. Clarke co-wrote the

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Sylacauga

Sylacauga In the last issue, we traveled to the strangely-named Benld, Illinois, to investigate a close encounter with a meteorite. In 1938, some humans had the closest recorded brush with a meteorite impact. Just 50 feet away, a space rock hit a garage, went through the ceiling of a car, its cushion, its floorboard, bounced off

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Snapping Shrimp

Snapping Shrimp As submarines became a staple of battle in the World War era and sonar matured into a necessary tool, humans began to notice something odd in the depths. Something very weird was messing with our ability to hear sufficiently underwater. It wasn’t a Kraken; it wasn’t dolphins; it wasn’t whales. It was a

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