Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

Dreams of Other Worlds (Amazon link) Dreams of Other Worlds: The Amazing Story of Unmanned Space Exploration   By Chris Impey...

No one has seen a Machu Picchu arboreal chinchilla rat ( Cuscomys oblativa ) alive.  It was known only from Incan-era skulls and was consid...

This time, I'll just let the picture tell the story.  This is  Comet 67P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko as seen from 29 kilometers by ESA's...

Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea Helen M. Rozwadowski. Belknap (Harvard University Press), 2005. ...

That's the title of a children's book that got me interested in rocketry a long time back (as Ishmael says, "never mind how lo...

Over the long and perilous history of Arctic exploration, there have been many tragedies and many disappearances. For example, the great Roa...

A great bit from collegehumor.com in which Sebastian the Crab leaves his shallow-water reef and sings (nervously) about the denizens of the ...

The most frustrating cases in zoology / cryptozoology are those where a single specimen exists, but its provenance cannot be proved, and n...

Some years back ("never mind exactly how long ago," as Ishmael says), I had a chance to look in on Martha, the last passenger pige...

Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean Julia Whitty Houghton Mifflin, NY 2010 (link above is to a 2011 edition) 246pp....

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 ...