105 A.D. In China, Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Han Dynasty Chinese Imperial Court, invents the world’s first paper from a mixture of bamboo, fish nets, mulberry, and rags. He will eventually become wealthy after he present his paper to the Emperor Han Ho Ti. 1702 The first regularly pr...

Captured and accused of piracy, privateer Blaise Risner, captain of the Golden Stallion, finds himself in a clinch--literally--with Confederation Admiral Peter Keller, who promises to see justice done by way of hard labor. But when the chemistry between them rivals the heat of the twin Talixin suns,...

1797 Thomas Jefferson presents a paper on the Megalonyx to the American Philosophical Society. It will be published as “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of American Philosophical Society 4:255-256...

1497 Nicolaus Copernicus first begins to record his astronomical observations. 1611 Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricius becomes the first person to observe sunspots as he observes the rising sun through his telescope. Observing the Sun becomes painful, so Fabricius and his father will soon switch to...

1646 The very first patent in the the New World (America) is issued by the General Court of Massachusetts to Joseph Jenkes, to protect his scyth mill engine from competition. The patent is granted for fourteen years. The patent comes four years before the first US corporate charter, which will also ...

1590 Tycho Brahe discovers a comet in the constellation Pisces. 1616 Copernican theory is declared “false and erroneous” in a decree written by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and issued by the Catholic Church in Rome. Further, no person was to be permitted to hold or teach the theory that t...

1908 Gabriel Lippman introduces the new three-dimensional color photography to the Academy of Sciences. 1933 RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. releases the great-granddaddy of all monster movies, King Kong, directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bru...

Feedback thread is here. A Star Trek story I am writing. Not finished yet, but most of it is, and hopefully posting it here will help to motivate me to finish it. I'll post the prologue and the first chapter now. The prologue is a scene (two, actually) from one of the Voyager episodes (as is the epi...

  Patients, I want to preface the sage advice I am about to dispense by saying that I truly believe that you have come to the right person. It is well documented that I am right about most things and I appreciate Luis giving me the opportunity to voice my opinions. I am so confident in my abil...

The European Southern Observatory just released a whoppingly cool picture: Whoa. That’s the Carina nebulosity region, a vast complex of stars, gas, and dust in the southern skies, one of if not the largest star-forming regions in the galaxy. This shows only a piece of it 144 light years across...