Of what use is a newborn baby? This rhetorical question, variously attributed to Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday and Thomas Edison, is meant to suggest that a novel discovery or invention whose ultimate utility is not ...
Materials Science
Apr 22, 2015
73
2953
It was, retired Japanese railway engineer Fumihiro Araki recalls, "like flying in the sky."
Engineering
Oct 1, 2014
1
2
British intelligence officials are baffled by a secret World War II message that was discovered on the leg of a dead pigeon, they admitted on Friday.
Other
Nov 23, 2012
76
0
Back in 2013, Timothy Koeth, an associate research professor at the University of Maryland, received a rather extraordinary birthday gift: a little cloth lunch pouch containing a small object wrapped in brown paper towels. ...
General Physics
May 1, 2019
1
402
No historical record may capture the nation's changing political consciousness better than the president's State of the Union address, delivered each year except one since 1790.
Social Sciences
Aug 10, 2015
2
157
On the evening of Feb. 2, 1942, an unarmed tanker with 66,000 barrels of crude oil on board was steaming in the Atlantic, about 90 miles off Ocean City, Md. Without warning, it was struck by German torpedoes. The attack set ...
Environment
Jul 17, 2011
11
0
Late in 2018, the gravitational wave observatory, LIGO, announced that they had detected the most distant and massive source of ripples of spacetime ever monitored: waves triggered by pairs of black holes colliding in deep ...
Astronomy
Dec 28, 2018
11
149
Old Asia-Pacific maps from Japanese Imperial Army archives are going online for modern use, such as studying changes in forest cover or the growth of cities, a Japanese researcher said Friday.
Internet
Jul 3, 2009
0
0
"The most interesting man in the world." "Reach out and touch someone." "Finger-lickin' good." Such advertising slogans have become fixtures of American culture, and each year millions now tune into the Super Bowl as much ...
Social Sciences
Jul 9, 2015
1
74
When U.S. President Barack Obama declared his support for same-sex marriage on May 9 of this year, the Twitterverse went into overdrive. Social media analysts reported that Twitter saw 1.6 million #gaymarriage tweets immediately ...
Social Sciences
Sep 3, 2012
0
1
