With the popularity of psychic experimentation and testing on the rise in the early 1970s, new methods attempting to verify the existence of ESP were devised. The Division of Parapsychology and Psychophysics at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City grew out of that institution’s dream research division…
The possibility of recording a three-dimensional image for later reconstruction through a hologram was developed out of early progress in X-ray and electron microscopy—notably by Hungarian-born Dennis Gabor, who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics…
The development of the Telstar satellites marked the dawn of the era of worldwide satellite communications. Telstar 1, launched in July 1962, and Telstar 2, which came ten months later, were engineered by a team at Bell Labs headed by John R. Pierce…
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was instituted as a newsletter to circulate among the nuclear science community in the aftermath of World War II and the Manhattan Project as a service and a warning to the world about the weapons they had created and unleashed…
For people of a certain age, the synthesized tones of the ident above and the animation of the “P-head” logo of the Public Broadcasting Service is indelibly marked in our memories of childhood. We can recall the educational programming that PBS brought into our homes: stalwart institutions like Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood…
In the early days of 1981, a new toy made its way to the West over the Iron Curtain. A few years earlier, a Hungarian architecture professor named Ernő Rubik had developed a “Magic Cube” while tinkering with ways to express rotation in 3D space in a single object…
In the early 1970s, the Stanford Research Institute received funding and support from a number of sources (including the Central Intelligence Agency, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences, and est leader Werner Erhard) to look into psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance, ESP, and precognition…
This two-minute television spot from 1985 promoted the Time-Life book series The Vietnam Experience, which was released serially from 1981 to 1988, perfectly bookending the Reagan years. Each of the 25 volumes covered subtopics about the Vietnam War from the American perspective, from military tactics to culture clashes…
The 1983 film WarGames, directed by John Badham and written by Walter Parkes and Lawrence Lasker, was a box office smash and eventually became a generational touchstone, offering mainstream audiences their first glimpse at the computer technology that would ineluctably become part of their lives in the next decade and beyond…
Maine schoolgirl Samantha Smith sent a momentous letter to Yuri Andropov, then General Secretary of the USSR, in autumn of 1982. She asked the Soviet leader, “Are you going to vote to have a war or not?” and “why [do] you want to conquer the world or at least our country?”
We Are the Mutants 