Articles by Sallie Baliunas
Free Time
But I like the giant metronome. It's a gigantic kinetic sculpture (for which outsize proportion matters) beckoning the city from its massive, gray plinth atop Letná Hill north across the Vltava River. The body is shaped simply to present a...
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Year of the Dog
The Year of the Dog by the Chinese calendar began Jan. 29 so we note that the Westminster Kennel Club just finished its 130th annual dog show and Crufts holds its 103rd competition in few weeks, March 9-12. The Chinese...
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The Relative Longevity of Science Frauds
The fabricated evidence on human stem cells published by Hwang Woo-suk and colleagues had a life shorter than two years as scientific fact. In contrast, the infamous hominid remains of Piltdown Man announced in 1912 stood as real for nearly...
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"What's Merry About All This, You Ask?"
Snow storms trapped and drained wearied American troops, desperately short of ammunition and supplies as German forces surrounded thinly-held Bastogne. The 101st Airborne Division and their comrades would be seeing Christmas 1944 not in peace and warmth but in the.
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Descent of Man in Dover
Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania has been billed as a test of whether teaching intelligent design in a science class amounts to a state establishment of...
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Ports in a Storm
CHANGI, EAST SINGAPORE -- A great port city is inundated. Hundreds, even thousands die in the initial wave. No. It's not New Orleans. It's Singapore. And it wasn't a hurricane, typhoon or tsunami, but the terrible wave of the Japanese...
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What's In A Name?
"We are, thereby, thanks to you, definitely in possession of a new world"-- French astronomer Le Verrier to German astronomer Galle, who first recognized the new planet Neptune on September 25, 1846 Three new worlds (one with a satellite) just...
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Science Funding's Unintended Consequences
According to an eye-popping article in the June 9 Nature, about one-third of more than 3,200 polled U.S. researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health self-reported serious scientific misbehavior during the three years prior to being surveyed. High respon
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Climate Political Science
Residents in the New York metropolitan region now can consult Climate Change Information Resources. This new web page sews together climate science and public advice through an advisory committee that includes government agencies and environmental organizations. Th
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The Hughes Beyond "The Aviator"
Five Oscars flew at the latest Academy Awards festival to The Aviator (2004), director Martin Scorsese's sumptuous view of the remarkable Howard Hughes (1905-1976). Scorsese portrayed Hughes through the zenith of his expansive, uncompromising genius for technology
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