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Rings with discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…) Victorians prevented their most closely kept secrets—illicit love letters, perhaps? Last wills and testaments?—from falling […] A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the...

If you want to learn how the planets move, you’ll almost certainly go to one place first: Youtube. Yes, there have been plenty of worthwhile books written on the subject, and reading them will prove essential to further deepening your understanding. But videos have the capacity of motion, an undeniable benefit when motion itself is […] A 16th-Century Astronomy Book Featured “Analog Computers” to...

Willem Janszoon Blaeu Celestial Globe 1602 No matter how accustomed we've grown over the centuries to flat maps of the world, they can never be perfectly accurate. Strictly speaking, no map can perfectly capture the territory it describes (an impossibility memorably fictionalized by Jorge Luis Borges in "On Exactitude in Science"), but there's a reason […] 3D Interactive Globes Now Online: Spin Through an...

Sixty years ago, mankind got its very first glimpse of the far side of the Moon, so called because it faces away from the Earth. (And as astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson have long taken pains to point out to Pink Floyd fans, it isn't "dark.") Taken by the Soviet Union, that first photo may […] The Very First Picture of the Far Side...

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early 60s. Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery is in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962. Although the program's handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any way, […] NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell...