Dinosaur Colors: Now Officially RedonkulousFebruary 04, 2010 – I seem to have ended up as the Dinosaur Feather Color Bureau Chief at the New York Times. After discovering colors in fossil bird feathers, scientists found colors in dinosaurs last week. But this week another group of scientists has got the color pattern across a dinosaur’s entire body. Imagine: Silver Spangled Hamburgs of the Jurassic! Image […]
Age of Citizen Science – Four Websites Where You Can Lend a HandSeptember 29, 2009 – Crowdsourcing. Group thinking. Call it what you will, but in the past ten years, average Joes tasked with online assignments (from bird counting to cloud identification and more) have contributed reams of data to the scientific body. Just one thing: Few scientists ever took it seriously. That’s changed. Sites are better, questions keener, and citizens…
Paddles with PenguinsApril 07, 2010 – About a month ago, Andrew Evans, our contributing editor who traveled 10,000 miles to Antarctica from Washington, D.C., mostly by bus, posted a video of him with a penguin on his lap. After watching the video, I began missing the birds I sunbathed and paddled with on the Boulders Beach, near Cape Town, South Africa,…
Headliners: Adventure in 60 SecondsOctober 13, 2008 – A roundup of the latest adventure news, by Mindy Zacharjasz Au revoir trains, bon jour…bird traffic? Swiss pilot Yves Rossy crossed the English Channel propelled by a self-designed jetpack strapped to his back after jumping out of a plane at 8,000 feet. How did “Fusionman” steer his eight-foot wingspan the 22 miles from France to…
Art From AboveMarch 02, 2010 – Making art that is best viewed from a distance is nothing new. But, when the Nasca etched giant images of birds and lizards and spirals into the Peruvian desert around 100 B.C. they probably weren’t thinking about Google Earth. (Check out Nasca Lines: The Buried Secrets this Thursday, March 4th at 6 p.m. the National…