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Scientific American is a popular science magazine published first weekly and later monthly since August 28, 1845, making it one of the oldest continuously published periodicals in the United States. It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience.

It had a monthly circulation of roughly 555,000 US and 90,000 international as of December 2005. It is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience. In the past, scientists interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise made up the magazine’s target audience. Now, the publication is aimed at educational general readers who are interested in scientific issues. The magazine was founded by Rufus M. Porter as a single-page newsletter and throughout its early years Scientific American put much emphasis on reports of what was going on at the US patent office.

The publication reported on a broad range of inventions that includes perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds a place in nearly every automobile manufactured. The magazine evolved into something of a “workbench” publication, similar to the 20th century incarnation of Popular Science.

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Ira Levin was born in New York City and grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan. He attended Drake University in Iowa for two years before transferring to New York University, from which he received a bachelor’s degree in 1950. While in college, he entered a television screenwriting contest sponsored by CBS. He was a runner-up and sold his script to NBC where it became an episode on an anthology suspense series in 1951.

While still in his twenties and writing for TV, Levin published his first novel, A Kiss Before Dying about a cold-blooded ambitious young man who murders his wealthy girlfriend, gets away with it, and gets involved with her sister. The novel won the 1954 Edgar Award for the best first novel from the Mystery Writers of America and it was adapted into a film twice – in 1956 with Robert Wagner and in 1991 with Matt Dillon.

Rosemary’s Baby was published in 1967 and told the story of a young New York bride who may have been impregnated by the Devil. It was made into a critically and commercially successful film in 1968, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes. The Stepford Wives was published in 1972 and featured women in an idyllic suburb who appear to have been replaced by subservient androids. It too was adapted into a film twice – in 1975 with Katharine Ross and Paula Prentiss and in 2004 with Nicole Kidman and Matthew Broderick. Levin died in November 2007 from natural causes.

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Krakatoa is a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It has erupted repeatedly, massively, and with disastrous consequences throughout recorded history. The best known eruption culminated in a series of massive explosions on August 26-27, 1883, which was among the most violent volcanic events in modern times.

The eruption was the equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT – about 13,000 times the yield of the Little Boy bomb (13 to 16 KT) that devastated Hiroshima, Japan. The 1883 eruption ejected more than 25 cubic kilometers of rock, ash, and pumice, and generated the loudest sound in historically reported. The cataclysmic explosion was distinctly heard as far away as Perth in Australia approximately 1,930 miles, and the island of Rodrigues near Mauritius approximately 3,000 miles. Near Krakatoa, 165 villages and towns were destroyed and 132 seriously damaged, at least 36, 417 people died, and many thousands were injured by the explosion.

The eruption destroyed two-thirds of the island of Krakatoa. Eruptions at the volcano since 1927 have built a new island in the same location, called Anak Krakatoa. Small eruptions continued throughout October and were reported through February 1884. In the aftermath of the eruption, it was found that the island of Krakatoa had almost entirely disappeared, except for the southern half of Rakata cone.

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Galileo Galilei was a Tuscan physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy,” the “father of modern physics,” the “father of science,” and the “Father of Modern Science.”

His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honor, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Based only on uncertain descriptions of the telescope, invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo, in that same year, made a telescope with about 3x magnification, and later made others with up to about 32x magnification. With this improved device, he could see magnified, upright images on the Earth – it was what is known as a terrestrial telescope, or spyglass.

Galileo could also use it to observe the sky and for a time he was one of very few who could construct telescopes good enough for that purpose. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His work on the device made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses and trading issues.

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