Hasta La Gadget!

The name deriving from the Greek "eugenes," meaning "well-born," it should be no surprise that "eugenics" seeks to engineer a better human race by purposefully selecting good traits, and eliminating bad ones, as is common when breeding animals. Over the years, eugenics has had a number of proponents, from some of the greatest and most admires thinkers in western civilization to the worst human monsters to ever walk the earth.

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Fourteen cm in height and eight around, the world’s first battery looked more like primitive pre-Columbian art than an amazing piece of ancient technology. Although most experts agree that the device produced electricity, there is little consensus on what that power was intended to do.

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There’s a perception that religion and science go together about as well as mayonnaise and marshmallows. In some instances, this is, perhaps, true. But on a typically warm Southern California January in 1933 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California (the same place and same time that Jack Parsons of rocket science fame was doing his experiments – history intersecting!), religion and science proved that these two ideals didn’t have to be enemies.

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Life became stranger than fiction when federal authorities arrested the notorious hacker Ross Ulbricht [aka
‘Dread Pirate Roberts’] for crimes mirroring the fictional character of
Walter White in the award-winning TV drama, "Breaking Bad." Drug
trafficking, money-laundering and cold-blooded murder transformed a
mild-mannered physics student into an underworld kingpin, just as it had
for a chemistry teacher in that five-season AMC thriller.

The story behind NASA’s brief embrace of extraterrestrial sherry is a curious one. In the early seventies, the agency’s focus was shifting from short, Moon-focused missions to possibility of longer-term inhabitation of space. A revamped menu was among the most pressing challenges: food on the Gemini and Apollo programs came in dehydrated cube form, or squeezed from a pouch, and was universally regarded as inedible.

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