When editors were gods

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #8

Discover magazine's April 1995 hoax might not have fooled every reader, but it probably gave a lot of them nightmares.

In a brief story, the magazine described the recent discovery of a new life form in Antarctica. The hotheaded naked ice borer was a "hairless, pink, mole-like creature," about six inches in length, with "sharp incisors" and a "bony plate on their forehead." Its unusually high body temperature, radiating from that bony plate, allowed it to quickly tunnel through the ice and sneak up on unsuspecting penguins from below. After a pack of these charming creatures finished off a penguin, "webbed feet, a beak and some feathers" would be all that remained. They may also have been involved in the mysterious disappearance of a 19^th century polar explorer, but that was purely speculation.

Despite ample clues to its inauthenticity, the hoax seems to have taken in more than a few newspapers and TV stations.

In a generous 2010 tribute on the National Geographic website, writer Carl Zimmer called it "arguably the finest science-themed April Fool's joke of all time."

Great (and not-all-that-great) magazine hoaxes, #4

Those wags at MIT''s Technology Review may have been as surprised as anyone when a prank article in their April 1984 issue hit the news wires and made headlines all over the world. Scientists in the U.S. and U.S.S.R., the article claimed, had successfully mixed cells from a woolly mammoth (extinct for some 10,000 years) and a contemporary elephant to create a creature that was half and half.

The magazine's editor, John I. Mattill, explained the hoax in his October issue, by which time the tale, if not the animal, had taken on a life of its own.

But the story doesn't end there. In a rare case of life imitating hoax, the New York Times reported in September 2021 that a team of scientists and entrepreneurs led by Harvard Medical School biologist George Church had formed a company to bring back the woolly mammoth by editing elephant DNA. 

Can the hotheaded naked ice borer (to be covered in a future installment) be far behind?

The late Ben Bova's thoughts on immortality

A bit late in observing this, but the longtime science and science fiction writer and editor Ben Bova died on Nov. 29 at age 88. Among other posts, Bova served as editor of Analog magazine and editorial director of Omni.

I interviewed Bova in 2000 on the subject of his then-current book, which happened to be immortality. That interview is archived here, thanks to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and it's still pretty interesting.

On this day...

... in 1792, Rufus Porter, founder of Scientific American magazine, painter, inventor, and all-around Renaissance man, was born in West Boxford, Massachusetts.