Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

  Very sad news today. Michael Collins , Command Module Pilot of Apollo 11, has embarked on his last voyage of exploration. Collins, who ro...

  Maybe readers can help solve this one.  What happened to Samson the bear? Samson was a California grizzly captured as an adult in 1854 by ...

Back when I was a kid reading about sharks, there were "more than 200" living species. Then 300, then 350, and now it's over 5...

Yesterday I watched my favorite big-bug movie, "The Deadly Mantis" (with MST3K commentary). It's a decent story and well-acted...

 Well, there was a lot of hype, but in the end the much-heralded thylacine photos were not of the "Tasmanian tiger," but of a sma...

 I had a great time chatting with Doug and Joel at Untold Radio.  My brain glitched a couple of times early on, but we had a good discussion...

First, the past. A coelacanth fossil discovered by accident turns out to be amazing.  The coelacanth may be five meters long, far larger tha...

A population of Bryde's whales (pronounced, approximately, Broodus ) in the Gulf of Mexico has been determined to be a new species: ama...

 It's traffic jam month on Mars. "Hope," the first space probe built by the UAE entered Mars orbit today.  The journey of expl...

From Mongabay.com:    " Researchers studying the impact of conservation actions since the landmark 1992 Rio Earth Summit say that at le...

  Hope forAnimals and Their World : How Endangered Species are Being Rescued from the Brink Goodall, Jane, with Thane Maynard and Gail Hud...

 Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert Massie Reviewed edition: Knopf Reprint, hardcover, 2009 (original 1981) Even very good biogra...

  35 years. Coming off a 24-hour stint in a Titan II ICBM solo. Hearing it on the car radio. Rushing home to turn the TV on with my wife. Wa...

  On NASA's Day of Remembrance The Explorers Souls departing Earthbound life Rise to heaven’s plane Soldier, sailor, priest, or king The...

There's always a lot going on, even if most of it is lost in the coverage of riots and disasters.  I love paleontologists, but maybe the...

  Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl Slaght, Johnathan. (2020: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 348pp.) ...

 Reaching way back in the bookshelf for this one.   AnimalTreasure: A Naturalist in Search of Strange Creatures Sanderson, Ivan T. (1937: ...

  End of Year Cryptozoology, as documented by Loren Coleman Loren, founder and director of the International Cryptozoology Museum, has tak...

  My friend R. Gilbert Moore has died. Gil Moore was an engineer of rockets and satellites and a relentless proponent of space education, fr...