SpaceX’s new spacesuit design, apparently modeled by Musk himself. (Credit: SpaceX)
When SpaceX launches its first crewed flights next year, they’ll be crossing the Kármán line in style.
In an Instagram post, CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company’s new space suits, noting the pains that went into creating a design that was both safe and snazzy.
“Was incredibly hard to balance esthetics and function. Easy to do either separately,” he writes.
A sleek ...read more
Here be diamonds. (Credit: NASA)
Some planets in our solar system are hiding a gleaming bounty deep within: showers of diamonds formed via crushing pressures and blazing temperatures.
Uranus and Neptune, the ice giants, are massive balls of mostly hydrogen and helium, with some water and ammonia. The “ices” give them their nicknames, but temperatures soar to thousands of degrees deep inside. Mixed in with the gases is carbon, mostly joined to hydrogen atoms to form hydrocarbon ...read more
A July 2017 eruption of Sinabung in Indonesia captured as it happened by Earth-observing “Doves” launched by Planet Labs. Image by Planet Labs (CC BY-SA 4.0)
One of the most exciting aspects of geosciences in the 21st century is the ability to watch geologic events from space. We can see an eruption or earthquake as it happens—sometimes catching it in the act. We can also roll back the film and look at what things were like in images taken beforehand. It is one of th ...read more
What Mars could have looked like during an ice age 400,000 years ago. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Given that there are ambitious plans to colonize Mars in the near future, it is surprising how much we still have to learn about what it would be like to actually live on the planet. Take the weather, for instance. We know there are wild fluctuations in Mars’s climate – and that it is very windy and at times cloudy (though too cold and dry for rainfall). But does it snow? Might settlers on Mars ...read more
USS Indianapolis (CA 35) is shown off the Mare Island Navy Yard, in Northern California, July 10, 1945, after her final overhaul and repair of combat damage. The photo was taken before the ship delivered atomic bomb components to Tinian and just 20 days before she was sunk by a Japanese submarine. Credit: U.S. Navy
The sinking of the USS Indianapolis by an Japanese submarine in the closing days of World War II marked one of the U.S. Navy’s greatest maritime tragedies. But the recent redi ...read more
A new tool called the R-factor could help ensure that science is reproducible and valid, according to a preprint posted on biorxiv: Science with no fiction. The authors, led by Peter Grabitz, are so confident in their idea that they’ve created a company called Verum Analytics to promote it. But how useful is this new metric going to be?
Not very useful, in my view. The R-factor (which stands for “reproducibility, reputation, responsibility, and robustness”) strikes me as a flaw ...read more
A total solar eclipse on March 9, 2016, as seen by NASA’s DSCOVR spacecraft.
Millions of people across the United States will cast their gaze upward to watch tomorrow’s total solar eclipse as it passes across the breadth of the nation. But what would it look like if you could gaze down on it from a million miles away in space?
For an answer, check out the animation above. It consists of 13 images acquired by the EPIC camera aboard NASA’s DSCOVR spacecraft ...read more
