Equine on I-Six-Nine What’s in a name? that which we call Bold and BossyBy any other name would bolt as sweetly. — Bill Shakespeare, Boldeo and Bossiet We attempt to imbue much with the names we give our offspring and our critter companions. Horse trainers have a long history of apt, clever, […]
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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 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 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
The Benld Meteorite The scene: Benld, Illinois. The date: 29 September 1938. This story offered two strange things to my world. The larger anecdote we’ll get to in a bit, but let’s start with the second, smaller interesting point. How in the world do you pronounce Benld? What is a Benld? Who is or was
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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