News & More
“STS-135: the Final Mission.” Sounds like the title of a new Star Trek film, doesn’t it? In reality, it’s the phrase denoting the end of our nation’s space shuttle program.
Videos
We humans have long feared the dark. That’s where scary monsters hide and criminals lurk. So that’s why, for most of our history on the planet, we’ve been trying to dominate the night by filling it with light. In many cases, illuminating our nights has worked.
News & More
You momentarily forget where you set down your keys—and you just happen to be over 50 years of age—and you can already hear in your mind the jokes that will ensue: you’re having a “senior moment,” you’ve got “old-timer’s” or “well, age happens.”
News & More
Images of natural landscapes have spoken to our souls since the time we started painting them on cave walls. And every few months, it seems, another new report touts the healing benefits of the outdoors and green spaces.
Nature & Wildlife
If you dread overseas flights because you always land intolerably tired and exceedingly hungry, I have some facts that might help you put such ordeals into perspective. It was recently discovered that a female bar-tailed godwit flew 7,145 miles from Alaska to New Zealand—without taking a single break for food or drink.
Travel Tips
We humans seem to have a great need to anthropomorphize; that is, we tend to want to ascribe human characteristics to inanimate objects, nonhuman animals and natural phenomena, such as the wind, rain or sun.
News & More
I’ll admit it: I’m a vampire-story junkie. Ever since I read Anne Rice’s 1976 novel Interview with a Vampire, I’ve been thirsting—shall we say—for more. So, you can see why I was “sucked in” to watching The Vampire Diaries series on TV, ever since it premiered in 2009.
Travel Tips
I still vividly recall the dream, even though I couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old when I had it. I was flying, low—without a plane, mind you—over Alaska. I soared above waving fields of purple flowers and gurgling, ribbon-like, blue rivers.
News & More
When Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, stepped into her twin-engine plane in Miami on June 1, 1937, they were embarking on an adventure of a grand sort. The two hoped to fly around the world, following the Equator.
News & More
Two very old whales are telling us a fascinating story. They are fossils—a male and a pregnant female—that were discovered in Pakistan in 2000 and 2004. Researchers say that these 47.5-million-year-old cetaceans are beginning to reveal that, without a doubt, our modern whales originated from terrestrial ancestors.
News & More
If you’re a fan of forensic TV programs—such as Bones, Dexter, Fringe or one of the several CSI series—you can’t help but be familiar with the many ways DNA testing may be put to use: to gather evidence at crime scenes, determine family relationships or prove the recent whereabouts of a missing person, among others.
Conservation
“I’ll never, ever go on a field trip again,” wailed the little boy ahead of me. It was in the afternoon on one of those golden fall days in Wisconsin when the trees splash brilliant oranges and yellows over the landscape.
