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LSD. Acid. Lucy. Whatever you decide to call it, lysergic acid diethylamide has been illegal for years in most countries world-wide despite a lack of science supporting its schedule 1 status. (Schedule 1 drugs are classified by the DEA as…
Apollo 13 is perhaps one of the most well known of the Apollo missions, though it did not start out that way. Initially there was so little public interest in the mission that there were no live television interviews with…
You’ve all heard about the theory of continental drift, right? You’ve heard of Pangaea and how the tectonic plates move around? This is something I remember learning about in elementary school and have always thought of as a theory that…
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was fascinated with the idea of building steam driven metal ships that could travel across oceans. He calculated that though the volume a ship could carry was cubically proportional to its dimension, the drag it experienced was…
After living in Bristol for a time, Isambard went on to work on constructing The Great Western Railway (GWR) which would connect Bristol and the south west of England with London. At the young age of twenty seven in 1833…
To Isambard Kingdom Brunel, January 12th, 1828 seemed like just another Saturday morning. Little did he know, it could have been his last. Brunel had only slept a mere four hours the night before, but this was typical as he…
Herpetology and getting lost. These are the two driving themes of my life. They have shaped my career and enabled me to discover species new to science, but they have also cost me relationships, frustrated everyone close to me, and…
NOTE: This post is not related in any way to the 1956 sci-fi film that depicts an extraterrestrial invasion where the invaders “steal” human bodies. This is NOT a review of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (though I do…