Category Archives: History

You Shall Not Pass: Making the Most of Your Passport

A British biometric passport.
A British biometric passport.

The idea of a document that extends protections over subjects as they travel is old — as in, Old Testament old. But the standardized booklet that we now use for establishing identity and citizenship when crossing international borders has only been with us for about a century. More to the point, in the post-9/11 world, it’s become a lot more important.

In this article, I cover the ins and outs of how to get one, when you’ll need one, and what to do if you lose one.  Along the way, I’ll pass along some travel tips, discuss passport alternatives and help you protect your children from  abduction across national borders.

How Passports Work 

Blood Will Tell: A Blood Spatter Analysis Update

Eduard Piotrowski of Poland’s University of Krakow published the first major blood spatter study in 1895, but its impact was limited to a few inventive European sleuths like German chemist Paul Jeserich and French forensic scientist Victor Balthazard. The American legal system did not adopt spatter analysis as evidence until the landmark case of State of Ohio v. Samuel Sheppard, and the field did not truly take off until the 1970s, after forensics expert Herbert MacDonell published his influential Flight Characteristics of Human Blood and Stain Patterns.

Blood spatter analysis has undergone major refinements in methods and language since then, including a recent and growing shift toward incorporating computers. I discuss several of these shifts in my 2015 update of Shanna Freeman’s 2007 article:

How Bloodstain Pattern Analysis Works

Who Names NASA’s Space Probes?

Early artist's conception of New Horizons, courtesy of NASA.
Early artist’s conception of New Horizons, courtesy of NASA.

The latest NASA space probes to make the news have zoomed to the farthest reaches of the solar system, and their names – Pluto’s New Horizons, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s Rosetta and Philae – reflect the ambition and spirit of discovery behind them.

But who gets to pick those evocative names, and is there any pattern that ties them together? Read on …

What’s Way Cooler Than Naming a Kid? Naming a NASA Spacecraft

Maggot Therapy: Seven Debridement’s for Seven Brothers

Maggots (small brown dots) in BioBag (left) , ready for work

During World War I, an American surgeon named William Baer noted that the maggot-ridden wounds he found on some soldiers looked surprisingly healthy, showing fewer signs of inflammation or infection. Baer’s observation was really a rediscovery of the medical value of maggots, a quality known to Napoleon’s Army doctors and probably used by civilizations as far back as the ancient Maya.

Today, doctors use the creepy crawlies to stem infections, speed healing and save money, particularly in cases of chronic wounds like diabetic foot ulcers. Ask your doctor if medical maggots are right for you – but first read

How Maggot Therapy Works

The Global Genetic Coronal Phosphorescent Thermohaline Economic Asteroid-Earthquake Singularity War That Will Doom Us All

“The Last Day of Pompeii” by Karl Briullov.

In the real world, disasters aren’t just a matter of scale – they’re a question of preparedness and of a society’s capacity to handle the fallout. Vaccines, rapid-response teams and early-warning systems can move the needle from calamity toward recovery, while poverty, corruption and ignorance slide it toward catastrophe. So, cue announcer: “In a world … where real disasters aren’t single events that arise from simple problems that are solvable in 93 minutes  …”

10 Possible Future Disasters