Stories by Brian Malow

One of astronomy’s great explainers tells you about the Event Horizon Telescope’s image and plenty more

With a wingspan of 20 to 24 feet, Pelagornis sandersi may have been the largest flying bird ever to grace the skies of the Earth. Gone now for some 25 million years, the current living contender for that title belongs to the Royal Albatross – at less than half that wingspan.

Today is Annalee Newitz‘s birthday (well, it’s still today in the most relevant time zone – uh, hers not mine). Annalee has been writing about the intersection of science and technology and culture for many years.

This video made me laugh harder than anything I’ve seen in a long time. Okay, except for some Louis CK videos. But for a non-comedian (allegedly)… this is hard to beat.

By now, I hope you’ve heard about Particle Fever. It premiered a few weeks ago – if I remember correctly, the same week as Neil deGrasse Tyson’s new Cosmos premiered.

Children are quite a bit like cats. No matter how much you spend on gifts for them, inevitably it is the box – which had contained the gift – that seems to provide the most raucous and satisfying entertainment for them.

Ha! A nice comedic attack on climate change deniers from 350 Action. Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efAUCG9oTb8#t=109

This was a great little Thanksgiving treat. Granted, it’s basically a commercial which is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of a commercial, but it’s fascinating nonetheless.

With 23andMe in the news this week, I thought it was a good time to share something I’d never published before. It’s a short interview with Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe.

At approximately 2pm today, I’m hosting a live interview with Lindsay Zanno and Pete Makovicky, two paleontologist who just published their remarkable new dinosaur discovery – of one of the largest predatory dinosaurs ever found in North America.

SpaceX – of course – is already one of my favorite companies on the planet, or even throughout Known Space. They’re not-so-quietly revolutionizing the terran space industry with the humble goal of ultimately “enabling people to live on other planets.” Hey, I’m a person!

In my day job – a phrase that still doesn’t roll off the tongue, having been a freelancer for two decades – I work at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh.

In honor of Peter Higgs and Francois Englert being awarded the Nobel Prize in physics 48 years after they predicted the existence of the Higgs Boson, here’s all I have to say on the matter: To see the joke in action/context, here’s a stand up routine of mine that’s been online since 2009.

Wow. This is the most awesome thing I saw yesterday, even though I watched – and enjoyed – Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. This short video entitled, “Box,” packed a bigger punch in five minutes than Joss Whedon and ABC did in an hour.

The olinguito has become a science media darling this past week. And why not? It’s small and furry and doesn’t look quite like anything you’ve seen before.

In North Carolina, this was a big year for cicadas. Our 17-year cicadas, after biding their time underground for so very long, finally emerged in the spring.