These aren't necessarily the biggest stories of the year, but they're some of the most interesting ones that I've covered on the blog over the last year or so. For ... Read More

Jan. 3, 1486 - Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests an experimental flying machine. Jan. 4, 1643 - English physicist, alchemist, and government official Sir Isaac Newton is born. Newton's accomplishments are ... Read More

President-Elect Barack Obama has announced the key figures in his scientific team, including two Nobel Prize-winners. The announcements of his scientific team was made on December 17, during his weekly ... Read More

Dec. 27, 1571 - Johannes Kepler, German mathematician and astronomer, is born. Kepler is best known for developing Kepler's three laws of planetary motion. Dec. 28, 1612 - Galileo Galilei discovers ... Read More

In this film, Matthew Broderick stars as young Richard P. Feynman, back in the 1930s and 1940s as he got his degree and began work on the Manhattan Project. Specifically, ... Read More

Dec. 19, 1714 - American astronomer John Winthrop is born. Winthrop was one of the first American scientists to be taken seriously in Europe, and had close ties to the ... Read More

One of the best-selling popular science books of all time (probably the best-selling one) was Stephen Hawking's 1988 classic A Brief History of Time, which I read in middle school ... Read More

Dec. 14, 1546 - Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, mentor to Johannes Kepler, is born. Dec. 10, 1684 - Edmund Halley reads a paper entitled "De motu corporum in gyrum" ("On the ... Read More

The new record for storage of information in a quantum system - 7 milliseconds - is being reported in Nature Physics this week. The information is stored in a group ... Read More

On December 1, at University of Arizona's Steward Observatory, a man was put on trial for violating one of the fundamental laws of the universe. The man: Santa Claus. The ... Read More

A few days ago (Hawking Accepts Canadian Research Job), I mentioned Neil Turok, the cosmologist who is director of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and co-author of Endless Universe: ... Read More

Dec. 6, 1778 - French physicist & chemist Joseph Luis Gay-Lussac is born. Gay-Lussac is best known for the Gay-Lussac Law of gases, which says that pressure and temperature are ... Read More

Dr. Stephen Hawking has accepted a position as Distinguished Research Chair at Waterloo, Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, starting in summer of 2009. Hawking will step down from his Cambridge ... Read More