The diamond ring phase over Newberry, South Carolina, during the total solar eclipse August 21, 2017. (Credit: Michael Roudabush/Wikimedia Commons)
Tuesday, July 2, will bring a special kind of darkness to South America. In certain parts of Chile and Argentina, people will find a strange twilight falling as the Moon inches across and ultimately covers the Sun’s disk completely in a total solar eclipse lasting just over two minutes for most observers.
For those lucky people in the pat ...read more
The nearby red dwarf star TRAPPIST-1 has a system of seven Earth-size planets, all jammed into a space much smaller than the gap between the Sun and Mercury. (Credit: ESO/O. Furtak)
When I was an astronomy-obsessed kid, I learned that most of the stars in our galaxy and beyond are very similar to our Sun. No less an authority than Carl Sagan wrote that "the Sun is an ordinary, even a mediocre star." If that insight diminished the importance of our place in the universe, it also made it seem ...read more
This very blog forms a large part of a newly published study on research methods blogs in psychology. The paper has a spicy backstory.
Back in 2016, psychologist Susan Fiske caused much consternation with a draft article which branded certain (unnamed) bloggers as being “bullies” and “destructo-critics” who “destroy lives” through “methodological terrorism.”
Fiske's post (which later appeared in a more moderate version) was seen as pushba ...read more
An artistic representation of a white hole. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/Discover)
It was no less a luminary than Isaac Newton who taught us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Push on the wall, and it pushes back. With that in mind, cosmic "white holes" make a lot of sense — they seem inevitable, even.
We all know about black holes, those cosmic vacuum cleaners that suck in anything (including light) that gets too close. Well, what about th ...read more
This petri dish contains fungus samples collected from the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA/JPL)
Anywhere humans go, we bring companions along, in the form of bacteria and mold. Some of them, like gut bacteria, are essential for healthy living. Others are mere tagalongs. As hospitals well know, even the spaces meant to be most clean still teem with microbial life, and the International Space Station is no exception.
Astronauts have been cataloging the presence of microbes in sp ...read more
(Credit: Lizard/Shutterstock)
Crack open an oyster shell and the inner face shimmers in a rainbow of kaleidoscopic colors. This smooth material, known as mother-of-pearl, is beautiful and resilient – so resilient that it has inspired the creation of virtually shatterproof glass.
“Our bioinspired glass is 2-3 times more impact resistant than laminated glass and tempered glass -- the 'standards' for impact-resistant transparent materials,” says McGill University engineer F ...read more
(Credit: meyer_solutions/Shutterstock)
Deepfake videos are hard for untrained eyes to detect because they can be quite realistic. Whether used as personal weapons of revenge, to manipulate financial markets or to destabilize international relations, videos depicting people doing and saying things they never did or said are a fundamental threat to the longstanding idea that “seeing is believing.” Not anymore.
Most deepfakes are made by showing a computer algorithm many images of ...read more
Airplane contrails, also known as the ice clouds formed by airplane farts, could contribute substantially to climate change. This will be accentuated in the future as air travel ramps up. (Credit: Gajus/Shutterstock)
More than 40,000 airplanes crisscross the skies above the U.S. every day. The engines propelling the metal birds through the wild blue yonder leave behind distinct line-shaped clouds known as contrails. The wispy clouds form when water vapor from fuel combustion condenses and cr ...read more
Imagine a smoldering hot day in downtown Boston: temperatures have reached over 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and the sidewalks and streets are absorbing the strong heat from the sun and radiating it back into the air. Days like this are becoming hotter and more frequent. This “silent storm” causes more deaths in the US than all other weather hazards combined. Heat impacts human health, infrastructure, and the environment.
The Urban Heat Island (UHI) Effect
Urban areas trap heat insi ...read more
Dragonfly, with its eight rotors, will explore Saturn's moon Titan by flight, the first for an off-world mission. (Credit: Johns Hopkins APL)
Today, NASA announced the next mission in their New Frontiers program to explore the solar system. Dragonfly, a drone lander, will explore Saturn’s largest moon Titan.
Titan is the only solar system moon with an extensive
atmosphere and standing bodies of liquid on its surface. The moon is also
filled with organic materials, and is thought to ...read more
