On May 29, 1919, a solar eclipse forever altered our conception of gravity, rewrote the laws of physics and turned a 40-year-old, wild-haired scientist into a global celebrity.
When a villain threatened Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon picked up a bright red phone to call Batman. During the Cold War, a Moscow-to-Washington "red phone" served as a hotline to prevent nuclear attacks. Now SLAC has its own red phone.
You've got to understand that all this happened a long time ago, and I reckon that with the monitoring we have in place now we'd have picked up on the event much sooner. But even if it recurred today, would we have any idea what was causing it?
Ben Nachman and several friends climbed out on the roof of Westside High School in Omaha, Nebraska, hauling a tangle of wires and what resembled a car-top luggage carrier. The high school juniors weren't pulling some elaborate prank.
John Gilbey is a writer, photographer, educator, and project manager at Aberystwyth University in Wales. For the past two decades, his fiction and non-fiction stories have appeared in the likes of Nature, New Scientist, and the Guardian.
Many a college student has built a room around a sturdy coffee table made from a cast-off wooden cable spool. But when two University of Wisconsin graduate students went to the South Pole they found spools put to a different use: as chariot wheels
