Weekend full moon the biggest in about 20 years (CNN) — If the moon looks a little bit bigger and brighter this weekend, there’s a reason for that. It is. Saturday’s full moon will be a super “perigee moon” — the biggest in almost 20 years. This celestial event is far rarer than the famed blue moon, which happens once about every two-and-a-half years. “The last full moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993,” said Geoff Chester with the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington. “I’d say it’s worth a look.” Full moons look different because of the elliptical shape of the moon’s orbit. When it’s…

http://www.nmai.si.edu/exhibitions/horsenation/ AFTER A LONG ABSENCE— THE HORSE RETURNS NOVEMBER 14, 2009–JULY 7, 2011 GEORGE GUSTAV HEYE CENTER, NEW YORK The story of the relationship of Native peoples and horses is one of the great sagas of human contact with the animal world. Native peoples have traditionally regarded the animals in our lives as fellow creatures with which a common destiny is shared. When American Indians encountered horses—which some tribes call the Horse Nation—they found an ally, inspiring and useful in times of peace, and intrepid in times of war. Horses transformed Native life and became a central part of many tribal cultures. By the 1800s, American Indian horsemanship was legendary,…

  Forty-six years ago, at 4:15 a.m. on November 4, 1956, Soviet forces launched a major attack on Hungary aimed at crushing, once and for all, the spontaneous national uprising that had begun 12 days earlier. At 5:20 a.m., Hungarian Prime Minister Imre Nagy announced the invasion to the nation in a grim, 35-second broadcast, declaring: “Our troops are fighting. The Government is in its place.” However, within hours Nagy himself would seek asylum at the Yugoslav Embassy in Budapest while his former colleague and imminent replacement, János Kádár, who had been flown secretly from Moscow to the city of Szolnok, 60 miles southeast of the capital, prepared to take…

Freaks, Geeks, and GDP Why hasn’t the Internet helped the American economy grow as much as economists thought it would? By Annie Lowrey Posted Tuesday, March 8, 2011, at 10:17 AM ET ——————————————————————————– If you have attended any economists’ cocktail parties in the past month or so—lucky you!—then you have probably heard chatter about Tyler Cowen’s e-book, The Great Stagnation. The book seeks to explain why in the United States median wages have grown only slowly since the 1970s and have actually declined in the past decade. Cowen points to an innovation problem: Through the 1970s, the country had plenty of “low-hanging fruit” to juice GDP growth. In the past…