Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

International Cryptozoology Museum Conference Night 1 January 4, 2016 I like cryptozoologists.  Even though I don’t use the term fo...

The giant squid Architeuthis dux  isn't a new discovery: it was described in 1857. However, it was ignored by most learned men before th...

Someone once wrote, "History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there." All of us, amateur and prof...

I like aviation history and, like many others, enjoy the tales of oddities, one-offs, and planes that never quite made it.. My dad had a h...

On FaceBook, we have one of the most fun groups I've ever run across: The Greatest Planes That Never Were .  There's all kinds of in...

The sperm whales are, and were, a fearsome bunch.  The modern species    ( Physeter macrocephalus ), is the largest predator on Earth, now o...

I knew I was in trouble then the first photos showed a trail of yeti tracks we KNOW are goat tracks - indeed, this trail was never claimed b...

The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil-Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution 408 pages Columbia University Press; 2015 ...

Well, I finally saw The Martian, and, as someone who devoured the book, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's hard to make a movie like this, ...

Not so many years ago, whales were the favorite taxon of young Earth creationists (YECs) who were quick to point out the lack of transitiona...

How does one find unknown animals, and do stories/anecdotes help? Zoologists follow many lines of evidence - folklore, reports by local hun...

Discovering Cadborosaurus Dr. Paul LeBlond, John Kirk, Jason Walton Hancock House, 2014 172pp. LeBlond and his colleagues are quit...

The Titan II was a remarkable bird. The two-stage rocket, over a hundred feet tall and using storable hypergolic propellants (meaning automa...

New fish pop up all the time, and sometimes it turns out we knew about them for a while and scientists hadn't had the time or inclinatio...

Our newest launch vehicle will fly at 8 PM Eastern from Hawaii: http://www.24liveblog.com/live/1307947 Super Strypi is the latest attemp...

If you're going to illegally import an entire megalithic tomb from England, be sure to sift through the dirt. You don't know what el...

Most of the sources we used for our book The First Space Race (published 2004) have passed on. The latest, and almost the last of those I t...

Maybe today should be Exploration Day: a day when we can celebrate the courage (if not always the motives) of all explorers of the Americas:...

Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel Carl Safina Henry Holt, 2015 480pp. Safina's book gave me a problem when I tried to rate ...

The Space Age has turned 58 years old. On October 4, 1957, the world changed.   The 84-kg Object PS 1, as the Soviet Union called it - or...