Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

The Road to Loch Ness   Lee Murphy ( Defining Moments, 2014) The last two years have been good for cryptozoology-themed fiction.   We’...

Western popular culture loves prehistoric beasts, especially dinosaurs. Indeed, dinosaurs crowd out almost everything else.   Exceptions are...

Science was unaware the world’s smallest cetacean existed until 1950, when a single skull was found on the beach in the Gulf of California, ...

This story on io9.com is getting a lot of sharing. It's misleading because the one fact being cited has nothing to do with exploration...

OK, NSSD is a creation of persons unknown, promoted by bloggers such as Jay Cooney (see his   blog   Bizarre Zoology ), and taking off in cr...

Has NASA validated a radical new type of propulsion ? There’s certainly a lot of media attention being paid to the claim that NASA resear...

OK, everyone uses that weak pun, so why shouldn't I get into it? I use worse puns than that every day. And now that we are headed into S...

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. ...