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While holiday shoppers search frantically for the Moshi Monsters, LeapPad Explorers, or Lalaloopsy Silly Hair dolls atop their children's wish lists, many physicists remain engrossed in the properties of a simple 1940s-era toy -- the Slinky.

* Explorers find pipes, twine from doomed 1845 expedition * Franklin, 128 men died trying to find Northwest Passage [More]

For a limited time, the full text of this article is being made available for fans of Scientific American's page on Facebook. Read it now or become a fan . One hundred years ago, in June 1911, Robert Falcon Scott and 32 explorers--most of them British scientists, naval officers or seafarers--were huddled in the darkness of the Antarctic winter, when the sun never rises above the horizon and up to eight feet of ice seals the surrounding sea