On supporting science journalism
If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.
JUNE 1957
MOON DUST--"The possibility of actually bringing back some of the moon's material is a scientific bonanza so alluring that ingenious schemes have been proposed to accomplish it, even without landing on the moon. We might, for example, send a pair of rockets, one trailing the other closely by means of a homing device. The first rocket would drop a small atomic bomb on the moon. Since the moon has no atmosphere and comparatively little gravity, the bomb cloud would rise very high. The second rocket could dive into the cloud, collect some of the spray and emerge from its dive by means of an auxiliary jet. Of course, such a maneuver would require a miracle of electronic guidance.--Krafft A. Ehricke and George Gamow"
JUNE 1907
JAWS--"The plain fact is that the ferociousness of the shark is too well documented by long ex-perience to be dismissed as a legend. Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the greatest living expert on modern deep-sea diving, has reported harrowing encounters with sharks. Off the Cape Verde Islands of Portugal, Cousteau and his fellow diver Frédéric Dumas found themselves closely pressed by an eight-foot gray shark, later joined by two five-footers and several blue sharks. The pack resisted all attempts to drive them off: they would shy away only to come back almost at once. The two men used every method in the diver's book. The sharks were not scared off by any of these tricks, or by the shark 'repellent' (copper acetate) strapped to the divers' legs or by a blow Cousteau gave one approaching shark on the nose with his heavy undersea camera. The two back-tracking divers got out just in time."
