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5 votes
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Marie Curie's PhD thesis
8 votes -
The tempest prognosticator
4 votes -
Twitter thread about Doug Geisler, an astronomy grad student who was at Manastash Ridge Observatory forty years ago when Mount St. Helens exploded 140 miles away
@emsque: Exactly #40YearsAgo Doug Geisler was asleep atop Manastash Ridge Observatory. An astronomy grad student, he'd just logged his first excellent night at the telescope for his PhD thesis. He was the only person on the summit, ~90 miles from #MountStHelens... #MSH40
9 votes -
At the limits of thought: Science today stands at a crossroads--will its progress be driven by human minds or by the machines that we’ve created?
3 votes -
Smallpox and the long road to eradication
6 votes -
Fruit trenches: Cultivating subtropical plants in freezing temperatures
7 votes -
Quantum steampunk: 19th-century science meets technology of today
5 votes -
Chloroquine, past and present
3 votes -
A brief history of quantum mechanics
7 votes -
Russian and Egyptian multiplication
5 votes -
The real experiments that inspired Frankenstein
3 votes -
Scientists synthesize the voice of 3000 year old mummy
7 votes -
From their balloons, the first aeronauts transformed our view of the world
5 votes -
That time the Mediterranean Sea disappeared
9 votes -
The most important invention of the 20th century: Transistors
7 votes -
How fungi made all life on land possible
9 votes -
Slaying the speckled monster - The history of smallpox and the origins of vaccines
6 votes -
Lasers reveal 60,000 ancient Maya structures in Guatemala
10 votes -
A new study posits that tsunamis triggered by the Great Alaska Earthquake in 1964 washed a deadly fungus onto the shore
6 votes -
Silvio Gesell, who wanted to create money that expired, is making a comeback
9 votes -
The human cost of amber - Fossils preserved in sap offer an astonishingly clear view of the distant past, but they come at a high price
6 votes -
The math of Emil Konopinski
7 votes -
Albert Einstein's relativity document gifted to Nobel museum
4 votes -
Who really invented the periodic table?
2 votes -
The hidden heroines of chaos
5 votes -
Robert R. Wilson's congressional testimony in favor of building a particle collider at Fermilab, April 1969
5 votes -
Mary Anning inspired 'she sells sea shells' — but she was actually a legendary fossil hunter
9 votes -
The Croc That Ran on Hooves
2 votes -
Biosphere 2 - The lost history of one of the world’s strangest science experiments
13 votes -
The cataclysmic break that (maybe) occurred in 1950
7 votes -
The Hitler Beetle and other oddities of scientific naming
4 votes -
When giant scorpions swarmed the seas
13 votes -
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’
14 votes -
What defines a kilogram? Before standardization, units of measurement were often manipulated by tyrants to cheat peasants and steal land.
9 votes -
Was Roman concrete better?
6 votes -
Newly discovered letter by Galileo shows that he lightly edited his original words to appease the Catholic Church
10 votes -
Mount Vesuvius murdered its victims in more brutal ways than we thought
4 votes -
Shockwaves from WWII bombing raids reached the edge of space
13 votes -
Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity first proven correct at what is now Australian lawn bowls club
3 votes -
Forging Islamic science
6 votes -
'A Nazi in all but name': Author argues Asperger's syndrome should be renamed
18 votes -
The spectre of smallpox lingers
9 votes -
Our pungent history: Sweat, perfume, and the scent of death
4 votes -
Michael Faraday - The Chemical History of a Candle [1848] (Probably the best scientific talk ever)
6 votes -
How learning science is catching up to Mr. Rogers
4 votes -
The location for Stonehenge may have been chosen due to the presence of a natural geological feature
I watched a documentary about Stonehenge tonight, and it proposed the theory that the location for Stonehenge was chosen because of a natural geological feature in the area. There's a man-made...
I watched a documentary about Stonehenge tonight, and it proposed the theory that the location for Stonehenge was chosen because of a natural geological feature in the area.
There's a man-made path that proceeds south-west towards Stonehenge: "The Avenue". This path was built around the same era as Stonehenge itself. If you walk westward along The Avenue on the winter solstice, you'll be facing the point on the horizon where the sun sets. However, under The Avenue, there's an old natural geological formation from the time of the Ice Age: a series of ridges in the rock which just coincidentally align with the sunset on the winter solstice (an "axis mundi"). Before Stonehenge was built, there was a chalk knoll on that location. That meant that you could walk along a natural geological path towards the sunset on the shortest day of the year, and there was a local geological landmark in front of you.
The theory is that these natural geological formations coincidentally aligning with an astronomical phenomenon made the site a special one for early Britons. That's why there was a burial site there, and later Stonehenge was built there.
Here's the article by the archaeologist who discovered the Ice Age ridges: Researching Stonehenge: Theories Past and Present
13 votes -
Feeding the gods: Hundreds of skulls reveal massive scale of human sacrifice in Aztec capital
7 votes -
What a Russian smile means - How culture and history make American and Russian smiles different
8 votes