Impossible Kisses

Many decades back, north of Chicago, Northwestern University had two astronomical observatories. One, with an old large refractor, wa...

I expect this is going to be a hard weekend for me. A few weeks ago when I was moving around all my stuff for spring cleaning , it occur...

“My colleague David Sands from Montana State University proposed the concept of ‘bioprecipitation’ over 25 years ago and few scientists t...

“Fantasy is essentially a dream world. An imaginative world. And I don’t think you want it quite real. You want an interpretation. An...

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume, His song so pitched as not to excite A single flower...

Serene bewilderment is a good thing. These days, you don’t get to feel it very often. Last week I did. The phrase—as I’m using it tod...

Butterflies bask in the sun, wings open left and right, warming themselves in the light. Books lie open in front of us, pages left an...

On April 20th in the Sierra Nevada mountains near Bishop, California, a group of high school students launched a "space weather ball...

Prologue to “Cutting Fences” — An Introduction in Three Parts 1) A Song It’s wild forever It echoes every song It’s wild and it’s s...

This is going to be a very strange post. And I apologize in advance if any of this offends anybody. Here’s some set-up for this. At ...

“I’m sorry I gave you bad info,” the mouse said, “but sometimes it isn’t really clear to us mice which of you humans are female and wh...

Back when the Police were very, very hot, some late night TV show broadcast live coverage of some big European music festival. The Polic...

The Antikythera mechanism is an ancient analog computer designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was recovered in 1900–1901 from ...

Today I want to tie up a couple of little loose ends. I don’t know what I’ll be posting about the rest of this week, but I want to do a ...

If we can believe the possibly dubious but very well-made and entertaining movie “Anonymous,” possible real-life supervillain Robert Ceci...

Over the weekend I stood by my window here south of Chicago, enjoying the seventeenth century Dutch sunshine in Delft and reading a book...