Posts tagged science
The monster is in my closet...
American Mastodon.
(via scientificillustration)
What did the first fictional aliens look like?
Laura Miller explains:
Before the nineteenth century, if authors depicted the inhabitants of other planets the aliens were essentially human. The suave Saturnian described by Voltaire in a satirical 1752 story, “Micromégas,” looks like an earthling, except that he’s six thousand feet tall. (And he has a Continental spirit, keeping a mistress—a “pretty little brunette, barely six hundred and sixty fathoms high.”) The Saturnian’s primary fictional purpose, as he visits our planet, is to marvel at the relative puniness of humankind, whom he examines with a very large microscope.
It was only after Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s and Charles Darwin’s theories of adaptation and natural selection gained wider acceptance, in the nineteenth century, that writers began to speculate in earnest about the sorts of creatures that might flourish in environments beyond Earth.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/06/04/120604crat_atlarge_miller#ixzz22if4IpAv
R.I.P. Lonesome George (1915? - 2012), last of the Pinta Island tortoises.
This postage stamp commemorates William Beebe’s 1934 descent in the bathysphere, and pictures deep sea fish that he reported seeing. Since Beebe was unable to collect specimens, the existence of some of these fish remains controversial.
The pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, or “snail telegraph,” was an attempt to harness telepathic snails for long-distance communication. First tested in 1851 by a French occultist named Jacques Toussaint Benoit, the idea was later revived by the eccentric socialist Jules Allix during the Siege of Paris, when the city was desperate for outside communication channels.
Millions of years ago, in Disneyland…
(Source: tystna, via solomonscane)
