Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

Think of the countless thousands of images NASA spacecraft have beamed to Earth.  Keith Cowing, owner of the NASAWatch web site, knew that m...

The latest in cryptozoologically-themed fiction is Grieg Beck's The First Bird . It's a lost world thriller which segues into a doo...

Dr. Sally Ride (PhD from Stanford in astrophysics) died two years ago today.  I went to a program at the Space Foundation Discovery Center ...

I've not posted on the continuing discoveries of new living species in a while, so let me throw out a few items. From Bolivia we have ...

OK, now that we're approaching Shark Week, which Discovery Channel has kicked off with a ridiculous hoax about a bull shark in Lake Onta...

We have another commercial mission off to the International Space Station. Orbital's Antares light/medium launcher is now 3 for 3  in fl...

Indeed, more than you wanted to know about.  Giant squid (the true giants, Architeuthis dux ), are among the most famous yet most mysterious...

Bill Gaubatz has died. Bill was a leader of the revolutionary DC-X reusable spaceplane program, which had great success with its small demon...

Cryptozoologists love to discuss the "sea serpent." It's a topic that never gets old, thanks to the romance of it, th...

Bryan Sykes is a well-respected Oxford professor with a stack of peer-reviewed scientific publications on DNA. Now he has a new one. His pap...

In the coolest recent test of gear that may get us to other planets (and by "us" I of course mean "me," or maybe that...

Could be.  A crowd-funded (!) expedition to the Torricelli Mountains of Papua New Guinea placed 40 trailcams and may have gotten pictures o...

  The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One Sylvia A. Earle National Geographic, Washington, DC, 2010 edition. 319pp. ...

CNN was the first all-news network, the first 24-hour news source, and has a founder (Ted Turner) who's been prominent in environmentali...

Sharks are scary.  And, frankly, they should be.  We humans are scared of sharks, not just because some species have killed people, but beca...

Indonesia has yielded the newest bird species known to science.   The Wakatobi Flowerpecker ( Dicaeum kuehni ) comes from a smaller island ...

Sarah Brightman will pay a whopping $52M to become the eighth space tourist to ride a Russian rocket to the ISS .  She's not talking muc...

Beneath the Dark Ice Greig Beck St. Martin's, 2010 320pp. This is the first novel I've read by Beck, and I enjoyed it.  His sub...

At the recent Space Symposium (formerly National Space Symposium), Boeing had a full-scale mockup of its cool CST-100 human transport on dis...

Another entry in the recent wave of sea-creature novels is Matthew Willis' Daedalus and the Deep . (Cotero Publishing, 2012: 248pp.) It...