The Unsilent Spring The sedge is wither’d from the lake, And no birds sing. – John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci” My absorption in the mystery and meaning of the sea have been stimulated and the writing of this book aided by the friendship and encouragement of William Beebe. – Rachel Carson, dedication in […]
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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
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The Bluetooth Bombshell Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler dropped into being on 9 November 1914 in Vienna, Austria. If you’re a fan of classic cinema, you might know Kiesler by her stage name, Hedy Lamarr. Billed by Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, as “the world’s most beautiful woman,” Lamarr found widespread fame during the Golden Age
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The Danish Temblor In our previous issue, we explored the recent confirmation of a theory that Earth has five layers instead of the previously believed four. The standard model included the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core. Before 1936, the models would have indicated the earth had just three layers: crust, mantle, core.
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Frankenstein’s Monster Volcano Mary Shelley might not be the first name encountered when considering women in science and nature, but she led an extraordinary life and has an intriguing connection to one of the largest events in geologic history. Additionally, many literary critics dubbed one of her novels as the first science-fiction piece ever written. Her
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Skywalker and Depthdiver The Dr. Seuss book Oh, the Places You’ll Go! is a fairly common graduation gift and for some people it is prophetic. If the book, published in 1990, had been around in the 1960s you might have been a true Nostradamus had you given a copy to Kathryn Sullivan. A couple of weeks ago she
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The Mother of Modern Physics Maria Salomea Skłodowska entered our orb in Warsaw, then part of the Russian empire, now the capital of Poland, on 7 November 1867. Her parents were both teachers, whose families had histories of involvement in Polish independence movements, and probably envisioned an erudite future for their youngest child. My guess,
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The Power of Jubilee Sometime in the 1930s, a father in London gave his daughter, instead of the usual teddy bear, a stuffed chimpanzee named Jubilee. According to the young girl, her mother’s friends were “horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten” her and give her “nightmares.” That father was Mortimer Herbert Morris-Goodall and his
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Grandma Gatewood In 1955, 67-year-old Emma Rowena Gatewood decreed to her adult children she was going for a walk. She didn’t offer details and, facing a stubborn and resilient woman, her children didn’t demand any. She grabbed an army blanket, a raincoat, and a plastic shower curtain, stuffed them into a handmade denim bag, doffed a pair
