Matt's Sci/Tech Blog

 The Soviet Moon Rocket: Lighting the Biggest Candle Ever The Soviets had their plans for the moon, too. Their spacecraft, showing the tradi...

 Ants are amazing. They have a division of labor. They have armies and make war. They raise food. They hold slaves. And they build, Thier un...

UFOs are a hot topic right now. Is there anything to them except errors by people and equipment? I don't know. The new NASA panel looks ...

  The newly-discovered Trapping Zone is a strange place. 500 meters down on the underwater slopes of the Maldives, small organisms gather in...

Many space programs have been proposed and canceled since the Space Age began 65 years ago.  None was more visionary - and probably more imp...

  Sputnik 1: October 4. 1957, the day the world changed. On October 4, 1957, the 84-kg Object PS 1, as the Soviet Union called it - or Spu...

All Creatures Weird and Dangerous Timm Otterson, DVM    I've said that  fiction allows for interesting speculation in the absence of har...

Friends know I love the ancient armored predator Dunkleosteus, which sort of resembles a steampunk submarine with a guillotine on the front....

It's fading a little bit. The memories of those of us who were not in New York or D.C. have to be jogged a bit to remember just how hard...

 Adrienne Mayor Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws: And Other Classical Myths, Historical Oddities, and Scientific Curiosities Princeton Un...

 Strange Creatures from Time and Space John A. Keel Original 1970 Reviewed: Sphere Books, 1976 My only interest in things sometimes grouped ...

I finally had a chance to see the year's blockbuster. I give it four stars for fun, one for plausibility.   Thirty years after the origi...

Nichelle Nichols of the original Star Trek has died.  Nichols broke many barriers on the show and in real life, including fighting for more...

Ah, Columbia, Columbia!  The first to take us to another world. The embodied hopes of a nation The sweat of thousands of men and women Do yo...

 No human has ever seen the star nursery called NGC 3324, seven light years away, so brilliantly and in such detail. We may never get a bett...

Thanks to Dave Hayes, I have a one of a kind Dunkleosteus trophy mount.  Shown here with some of the more famous Dunk models for scale, this...

 "The Ancient Vampire Squid" is a great title for a Sy-Fy Channel movie, or maybe a band, but here it refers to an interesting ani...

 Tactical space, tactical launch, responsive space, call it what you will, there's been a three-decade debate over how best to get Ameri...

 On this date in 1983, physicist turned astronaut Sally Ride became the first American woman in orbit. Salute her legacy. https://solarsys...

As Jurassic World: Dominion stomps into view, with great visuals (albeit with some inaccurate dinosaurs) and the stupidest plot in the enti...