UPDATE:  SOLVED at 12:29 CDT by Roger

Ah, Saturday.  Named for Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.  Dies Saturni became the Old English Saeternesdaeg, which became Saturday; the only day of the week where the English name comes from Roman mythology.

No, that’s not a clue for your riddle today… but it does give me some interesting ideas.  The riddles will be getting progressively tougher now, leading up to the bonus riddle.  Are you ready to play?  Got those neurons fired up and ready to go?  Grab a cup of coffee, and good luck:

Serpens, held by Ophiuchus - Image in public domain, from Urania's Mirror, London, c. 1825

Although thought of in the singular, this is composed of many parts.

An 18th century discovery, its image is recognized world-wide.

While it’s not visible to the naked eye, it doesn’t necessarily require a telescope to see parts of it.

It is well worth seeing, because it’s immensely beautiful… even if you don’t “get it”.

On a cosmic time scale, it is very young.

Even so, today’s subject may already be gone.

Today’s subject does feature in some modern fiction, but not as much as you’d expect.

Well, what do you think?  Do you know the answer?  I’m hanging out in the comments, as usual, and I’ll be waiting to hear from you.

Lurking, lurking, lurking... oh, hi!

One of the bright sides of being stranded at Perth by a giant ash cloud was a visit to Perth Zoo and, particualrly, visiting their orangutan exhibit. I’ve been to quite a number of zoos in my time and that had to rank with the best enclosures I have ever seen. The zoo is part of an international conservation programme and its six or so orangutans have a sizeable area to roam around, complete with tall towers, ropes, ladders and more. The next couple of posts will showcase some of the photos I took of these animals, and will help to fill some bloggy time as I wind my weary way back to the UK.

We start with the baby, who was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. Just try and look at these photos without grinning.

After taking the shot below, I asked a keeper about whether the orangutans ever undid the fixtures in their enclosure. She grinned and told me about the story described in this news report. One of the females actually undid a rope and swung out into the visitors’ area, showing remarkable restraint in just ambling along the wall and in not making a Tarzan noise. Because, clearly, that’s what you or I would have done.

One of the cooler blogs out there is Ironic Sans by David Friedman (the same guy who made scientific Valentine cards). He’s started a new blog called SundayMagazine.org, where posts and discusses old issues of the New York Times Sunday Magazine from the ancient archives.

In his first one, he found quite the catch:

How cool is that? The article is about a lettered French scientist speculating about what life would be like on other planets. David has a PDF of the article as well, which is an absolute delight to read. How wonderful to see something like that; an apparently scientifically-minded article, but free to have fun and take the reader to a totally different place than what they might expect!

It’s inspiring, in fact. Given that kind of freedom today, I wonder what other famous scientists of today would write about.

My next installment as a Point of Inquiry host just went up--you can download here and stream here. Here's a description of the show:
For many of us, chemistry is something we remember with groans from high school. Periodic Table of the Elements—what a pain to memorize, and what was the point, anyway? So how do you take a subject like chemistry and make it exciting, intriguing, and compelling? With her new book The Poisoner’s Handbook, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Deb Blum has done just that. Blum takes a page from the "CSI" franchise, and moves that familiar narrative of crime, intrigue, and high tech bad-guy catching back into the early days of the 20th century. There, in jazz age New York, she chronicles the birth of forensic chemistry at the hands of two scientific and public health pioneers—the city’s chief medical examiner Charles Norris, and his chemistry whiz side-kick Alexander Gettler. And while chronicling their poison-sleuthing careers, Blum also teaches quite a bit of science. Her book is a case study in science popularization, and one we should all be paying close attention to. Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer and has been a professor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison ...