It has been not quite a half-century since human beings stepped foot on another planetary body for the first time.
Forty-nine years ago today, to be exact.
It was on July 20, 1969 when Neil A. Armstrong, Commander of the Apollo 11 mission, descended the steps of the Lunar Module and upon reaching the surface uttered these instantly famous words: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." (Btw, if you think he didn't actually say "a man," ...read more
BAIKONUR, KAZAKHSTAN – That rocket looked so tiny from a mile away. Shining white against the dull beige sands of Baikonur, the Soyuz had three people on board all set for a ride to the International Space Station. From this distance, though, it appeared fragile, like a child's plaything.
Standing beside me was a member of the backup crew, Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques. He passed the time talking to me about other launches he had seen. When the Soyuz finally lighted ...read more
On Tuesday, Jupiter officially “gained� 10-12 moons. But that doesn’t make up for the dozens of moons the solar system has lost over time. Unlike the recent crop, the long lost moons were of pretty substantial size.
This includes even a few now missing moons for Jupiter. The king of our planets started out in a gas envelope, like the other planets. It’s system had quite a bit of heft, but the slow drag of this cloud m ...read more
The 2015 discovery of the TRAPPIST-1 system, with its seven Earth-sized planets, has redirected much of the exoplanet search toward M-dwarf systems — and justifiably so. Based on Kepler data, researchers estimate M-dwarfs (the most common type of star) host around 10 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way alone. But one question that immediately pops up regarding the search for exoplanets is that of habitability. In addition to other criteria, the presence of an atmosphe ...read more
Many people have pointed out to me that there is a news frenzy about "fissures opening near Yellowstone". Now, considering that if this were happening, that would be newsworthy, I had to check it out ... and with most "news" about Yellowstone, it is much ado about nothing related to the volcano in Wyoming.
Climbers in Grand Teton National Park, to the south of Yellowstone, have noticed that the cliff face at Hidden Falls and Inspiration has been breaking off due to cracks ("fissures ...read more
Hunting for exoplanets is a complex and time-consuming process. When an exoplanet candidate is detected, researchers have to observe it passing by its host star three times before they can officially confirm its existence. This isn’t a problem if the orbital period lasts a few days, weeks, or months, but it isn’t exactly effective if the planet takes years to transit its star.
Now, a new method published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics aims to ...read more
Since the announcement of its discovery earlier this month, the buried sarcophagus in Alexandria, Egypt, created a lot of speculation about who might be inside. Given the coffin’s large size and composition of granite, which would have had to be mined hundreds of miles away, experts said it was possible the coffin contained a man of importance, perhaps a nobleman of Alexander the Great. There was also a lot of online chatter about the possibility of unleashing a curse by openi ...read more
Tomorrow, on Saturday, July 21, Moth Week will commence! Running until Sunday, July 29, Moth Week is a way for people of all ages all around the world to come together to celebrate the beauty, life cycles, and habitats of moths. These self-described “Moth-ers� are in fact citizen scientists, as one of the key missions of Moth Week is to collect moth observation data.
Though many of the events are in the United States, this is truly a worldwide effort. ...read more
If you had to give yourself a C-section to save your unborn baby, could you do it? Having given birth to my own child, I'm not sure I could. But this woman did it. She had no other choice: she lost a previous baby during protracted labor, and she lived in a small village eight hours drive from the nearest hospital. In the abstract and detailed case report below, doctors tell her (harrowing) story. And they tell it for a good reason: "This case, which would not have occurr ...read more
Scientists revealed a new species of armored dinosaur at the Natural History Museum of Utah on Wednesday. The animal, a species of ankylosaur, lived in a wet, tropical environment in what’s now Southern Utah roughly 75 million years ago.
The herbivore sported spikes across its head and an intimidating tail club for fending off large predators like the tyrannosaurs that also roamed the landscape. Scientists dubbed it Akainacephalus johnsoni.
“Literally tra ...read more
