Where sea ice should already be present, there are just vast swaths of open water. The cause: storminess and massive inflows of warmth.
Alaska’s Norton Sound on the Bering Sea is seen in this animation of images from NASA’s Terra satellite. One image, acquired on Nov. 25, 2009, shows fractured sea ice filling the sound. The other, acquired on the same date this year, shows mostly open water. (The dark area to the right was not imaged by the satellite because of the polar n ...read more
It’s not too often that a toy depicts a real-life unsung hero in science, but the LEGO Women of NASA kit does that four times over. A couple of the names should be familiar — Sally Ride is the go to name for women in space and Margaret Hamilton’s picture has been making the rounds for a while now. Mae Jamison and Nancy Grace Roman, on the other hand, are probably less recognizable. But all four are incredible women whose mini-likeness you can now add to your own home decor ...read more
Scientists witness the first nuclear fission chain reaction. (Credit: John Cadel/Chicago History Museum)
Seventy-five years ago, the world officially entered the Atomic Age. Henceforth, it would never be the same.
In October 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi assembled a crack team of physicists for an urgent, top-secret government mission: Conduct the first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction to prove it was indeed possible to build an atomic weapon—and do ...read more
Going bravely where no spacecraft has gone before. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Man, they just don’t build ’em like they used to. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, has fired up a pair of thrusters that haven’t been used for 37 years. Meanwhile, I’m on my third car in two years.
The set of four small thrusters came online Wednesday after NASA engineers noticed the spacecraft’s attitude control thrusters had been degrading for several years. T ...read more
But up in the Arctic, the ironic forecast is for unusual warmth. What’s up with this weird pattern of a warm Arctic with cold continents?
Average forecast temperature anomalies for today through Dec. 5, 2017. (Source: Climate Reanalyzer/University of Maine)
Lately, I’ve been wondering what happened to winter. And my guess is that I’m not alone.
I live along the Front Range of Colorado, and we’ve been luxuriating in very unusual warmth for this time of year. In fact, ...read more
The Mariner 10 spacecraft experienced several problems, but nonetheless accomplished its goals, thanks to a smart mission team and some quick fixes. (Credit: NASA)
A tiny problem can have huge consequences for a space mission. Sometimes a huge endeavor hinges on the smallest detail — three seconds’ worth of fuel, an engineer’s stubbornness, a speck of paint, or a 1.3-millimeter calibration.
When surprise glitches revealed themselves after launch, it took massive efforts to sa ...read more
(Credit: Gallinago_media/Shutterstock)
If you’re an uptown rat, you don’t associate with the downtown kind.
Segregation is real if you’re a rat in New York City, though likely for more prosaic reasons than in their human counterparts. A recent genetic study of NYC rats found unique populations living in uptown and downtown Manhattan, indicating that they probably don’t interact with each other all that much.
City of Rats
The project is the work of Fordham Uni ...read more
Map of the moon engraved by the astronomer Johannes Hevelius, 1645. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
People have been dreaming about space travel for hundreds of years, long before the arrival of the spectacular technologies behind space exploration today – mighty engines roaring fire and thunder, shiny metal shapes gliding in the vastness of the universe.
We’ve only traveled into space in the last century, but humanity’s desire to reach the moon is far from recent. In the second c ...read more
