Friday, October 14, 2005

For Something Different...

Science Frontiers is a unique newsletter collecting snippets of information about scientific anomalies and curiosities from sources ranging from peer-reviewed papers to textbooks to popular media. I'm not talking about things like UFOs, although they occasionally do turn up, but such items as why the "red shift" measurement does not always work as it should for astronomers, why "earthquake lights" appear to be a real phenomenon but do not appear in all cases, and a report of traces of tobacco, a New World plant, in an Egyptian mummy. The newsletter is put out by an organization called The Sourcebook Project, which has culled hundreds of years of scientific and popular literature for this stuff, also available in collections:

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sourcebk.htm
The Project also sells a variety of mainstream and non-mainstream science books. The newsletter ($7/year for six issues of the print edition) is a very mixed bag, but always fascinating reading.

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