Far too many scientists who made major contributions to knowledge and human health go unremarked, forgotten save for the occasional postage stamp or Google doodle. So when I was offered the chance to write about a few of the many outstanding scientists who came from Spanish-speaking lands, cultures and ancestors, I was understandably excited…and a little nervous. On the one hand, combining such a varied assemblage of people under one term – especially the political term Hispanic – wasn’t ideal. On the other hand, it gave me the chance to explore, and raise awareness of, a remarkably diverse array of persons, backgrounds and accomplishments. I hope you’ll find their stories as inspiring as I did.
Tag Archives: fusion
The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon
Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.
Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.
And if you believe that, I’ve got some Venusian swampland to sell you
History is so replete with property swindles that we still have jokes about them. The phrase, “if you believe that, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you” derives from a favorite dodge of turn-of-the-century confidence men like George C. Parker, who sold the Brooklyn Bridge multiple times — along with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Statue of Liberty and Grant’s Tomb. Selling Florida swamp land, a favorite scam of the early 20th century, continues to this day.
Scan the internet, and you’ll quickly find a half-dozen companies ready to sell you your very own piece of space property, starting with the moon. In this article, I ask whether anyone can actually own our nearest neighbor, or if all these companies are exchanging for your green is a load of green cheese.