Trinity Batter my heart, three-person’d God — John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. — Vishnu, Bhagavad Gita In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered the possibility of nuclear fission. Physicists Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch realized the breakdown of radioactive elements could produce a weapon of planetary proportions. […]
The Birth of the Space Age I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn…and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if
The Birth of the Space Age Read More »
Artificial Intelligence [Editor’s Note: Normally, we do not replicate the prefaces to the newsletters on the website; often they do not pertain at all to the article at hand. This issue must stand as an exception. Other than the text immediately following, it’s important to add here that the article below was not edited, though
Artificial Intelligence Read More »
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
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
The Countess of Lovelace Read More »
James Webb Space Telescope If you’ve followed the newsletter from the early days, you’re well familiar with the Hubble Telescope and its myriad astronomical contributions. Some of the most resplendent images of the universe have come from the famed telescope. One might argue all of the most gorgeous imagery of the cosmos to date has
James Webb Space Telescope Read More »
NORAD In December 1948, in the interregnum between the end of World War II and the raging depths of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force provided a bit of levity in the face of growing nuclear tensions. They pushed a notification that their “early warning radar net to the north” had picked up a
The Croaking Voice Unless you live in Luddite Land, the Covid pandemic ushered in a new era of communication via the internet. Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and others became the socially-distant method to interact for work and play. The march toward online voice-chat ubiquity was not an overnight phenomenon, however. Landline technology
The Croaking Voice Read More »
The World’s Highest Helipad In the previous issue, we explored a charming creature with a name I originally thought must have been fabricated to sound like the name of another animal. However, numbats are more than just a name that evokes a wombat, they are bonafide members of our planet. Today’s topic could form a
The World’s Highest Helipad Read More »
How do we collect data inside the tempests of the sea?
Peering Into the Storm Read More »