This is quite simply the best blog post I’ve read all year.
Stand-up comedian Chris Coltrane discovered some 90-year-old science mags in his attic. Highlights include a Tube train that doesn’t need to stop, a discussion about whether the Earth is flat, and musings on whether we’ll ever harness the ‘horsepower’ of the atom.
Awesome!
Actually literally laughing out loud at this. Superb, thanks :)
Currently listening (while off work for the week and pottering about in my kitchen) to Science Friday podcast interview with actor Greg Kinnear talking about the story behind the invention of intermittent windscreen wipers…
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200810032
My favourite part is the subtitle ‘Incorporating Models, Railways and Locomotives’.
Don’t think it goes back to the 1920s but this hour long programme is entertaining:
Archive Hour: Putting It Simply
with Kathy Sykes
Kathy Sykes charts the way that science has been seen and heard on radio and television, from the postwar lectures on the Third Programme to the animation of Walking with Dinosaurs.
http://speechification.com/2008/02/28/archive-hour-putting-it-simply/
The Modern Mechanix blog is also very entertaining. If you click on the “Animals” category, there’s an entry on a Combination Cat and Fish Globe, in which kittens occupy a central bowl, surrounded by a larger bowl filled with water and goldfish.
Kristi, I am on to you now – I wondered what that guinea pig was really for.
Some of those articles are truly bizarre … like the one in which the mother hen
eatsis fed dye as part of an experiment, and then has a brood of chicks in freakish colors. Who funded that “research”, anyway … the Marshmallow Peeps Foundation??Those baby guinea pigs are acutely cute, Steffi – especially the white one with the cotton fluff tail and the pink feet. I am developing a squeee!mous cell giggleoma as a result.
Funnily enough, way back in the 1980s or 90s, when Nature published a significant paper about human origins (by Allan Wilson and possibly Caro-Beth Stewart, from my memory which could be at fault), providing support for the so-called “out of Africa” hypothesis, this is exactly the question all the media were asking and reporting on: “Was EVE Black”? (mitochondrial DNA being the data used for the analysis I recall, hence Eve not Adam.) Plus ca change?
Just read this post on the Women In Science blog.
Superheroes weren’t the only stars of Golden Age of comic books. There were also hard-boiled detectives, keeping America safe by solving crimes. My brother just sent me an awesome example of the genre: Jill Trent Science Sleuth, a short-lived series from Nedor Comics.
More at link, including pictures. No black guys as Adam, though ;-).