ScientistPankaj: This Month in the Archives

Thursday, August 19, 2021

This Month in the Archives

View all Scientific American publications.

We’re looking back this month at the origins of radio transmission, insights into complex bee behavior, and the exploration of other planets. Looking ahead, three new missions to Venus were approved recently (two from NASA and one from the European Space Agency) and we’re looking forward to learning more about our closest planetary sibling soon.

I hope you enjoy some highlights from the Scientific American archives. If you have any requests — any subjects you’d like to know more about from our archives — please let me know at laura.helmuth@sciam.com. You can browse through our 176-year record using the advanced search option here.

Wishing you good reading,
Laura Helmuth, Editor in Chief

Radio

By May 1924 radio broadcasting had become wildly popular.

April 1899:

“Telegraphy ... without connecting wires,” as explained by Guglielmo Marconi, saw radio as a way to communicate without telegraph lines.

May 1924:

Radio transmission became a commercial success when audio programs began regular broadcast: news, music, sports, entertainment of all sorts.

March 2009:

The world’s tiniest radio receiver: a single nanoscopic tube. Yes, it has applications.

Bees, Honey and Other

The stout little digger bee is an excellent pollinator and not aggressive.

May 1908:

“Organized anarchy”—this author on honeybee hierarchy seems utterly baffled. (Hint: bee colonies are a superorganism.)

July 1978:

Neurobiologists take a look at how tiny bee brains are so good at learning and remembering where to find good pollen or nectar.

February 1984:

Many bee species don’t live in colonies or hives. These solitary bees, though, are still vital pollinators.

Access 176 Years of Scientific Knowledge

Space Travel

Saturn, from the surface of Titan, 1915. A great image, all from imagination!

March 1915:

Saturn, the most interesting planet in the solar system—and that was even before we visited (well, our remote-controlled devices did).

March 2000:

A plan to get astronauts to Mars. Robots are all very well, but we humans are a conceited species and prefer to tromp around on alien planets ourselves.

March 2010:

The Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2005. We’re still sifting through the science that came from that.

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