All this news about the supposed new video of the Loch Ness Monster and the accompanying frenzy has me bursting to tell you about the new edition of the 1892 cryptozoology classic The Great Sea-Serpent by A. C. Oudemans that Cosimo will be publishing soon. This comprehensive treatise on the history of sea-monster sightings — at least through the end of the 19th century — describes 150 sightings back to the 16th century, including hoaxes, and theorizes on what, exactly, sailors and other witnesses were really seeing. This new edition is part of a new cryptozoology series we’re presenting with renowned cryptozoologist Loren Coleman.

We know geeks are psyched for this book, and I’ll let you know as soon as it’s available for sale.

(Technorati tags: Loch Ness Monster, Great Sea-Serpent, AC Oudemans, Loren Coleman)

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Sad news for astronomy buffs: The famous radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico — the largest of its kind on planet Earth, it was featured in the film Contact — is in danger of being shut down. Oh, it still works just fine, but the National Science Foundation, a U.S. federal agency, is considering cutting its funding. As Wired notes, the Arecibo facility “recorded the first planets beyond the solar system and helped detect lakes of hydrocarbons on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons.”

Arecibo has contributed tremendously to our understanding of the univserse, but for a look at what our knowledge of the stars was like before radio astromy came along, check out A History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, by Danish astronomer and a historian of astronomy J.D.E. Dreyer. More than a century after its first publication in English, this remains a helpful and readable introduction to historical astronomy. Beginning with humanity’s first attempts to understand our place in the universe and continuing through the age of Isaac Newton, Dreyer connects modern astronomers to those who laid the groundwork before them.

(Also check out The Story of the Stars, George Frederick Chambers’ 1895 primer on skywatching; its Victorian charm and poetical bent will remind you of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and it’s a treat for fans of the night sky.)

(Technorati tags: Arecibo, A History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler, JDE Dreyer)

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It’s Science Day here at Cosimo. (We’ll do religion another day.) Of course, we are bemused and aghast — as all thinking folk are — at the warm welcome the new Creation Museum in Kentucky is receiving. (We’re all for diversity of opinion, of course, but diversity of “fact” is another matter entirely.) We like what Media Bistro had to say about the museum: it’s “a great place to visit if you wanted to take a look at $27 million dollars worth of crazy.” But of course, we at Cosimo are overeducated Eastern liberals just like the wags at Media Bistro.

But we are book people. So we counter things like the Creation Museum with books. Like Island Life, by Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace, an English naturalist, developed a theory of natural selection independent of his contemporary Charles Darwin, and in this 1880 classic of scientific literature, he examines a variety of biospheres to determine whether species are immutable (as was long thought), regardless of changing conditions in their surroundings, or are in fact capable of adapting in order to survive. Based on his years of global travel observing fauna and flora and his ponderings on whether the environment in which they lived affected their development, Wallace offer case studies from islands as diverse as the Galapagos, Great Britain, and Madagascar to support his argument.

In the book, Wallace says:

Not only does the marvelous structure of each organized being involve the whole past history of the earth, but such apparently unimportant facts as the presence of certain types of plants and animals in one island rather than in another are… dependent on the long series of past geological changes; on those marvelous astronomical revolutions which cause a periodic variation of terrestrial climates; on the apparently fortuitous action of storms and currents in the conveyance of germs; and on the endlessly varied actions and reactions of organized beings on each other.

Funny how 127 years later, there are still some people who cannot accept this simple reality.

(Also check out The Wonderful Century, Wallace’s history of the marvelous scientific advances of the 19th century.)

(Technorati tags: Creation Museum, Evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace , Island Life)

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