Space may look vast, but it’s actually pretty crowded near Earth.
As of a couple of years ago, more than 1,300 active satellites orbited Earth, in addition to tens of thousands of dead satellites, discarded rockets and other bits and pieces that have accumulated in space in the 60 years since Sputnik, ranging in size from softballs to school buses. When we turn on a new radar in a few years that can see even smaller pieces, we are going to see millions of them.
And it’s going to con ...read more
An animation of satellite imagery offers a revealing perspective on the day-by-day growth of the Thomas Fire
False-color imagery from NASA’s Terra satellite reveals the growth of the Thomas Fire from Dec. 4 through the 16th. (Images: NASA Worldview. Animation: Tom Yulsman)
“Firefighters achieved huge successes yesterday during a BIG firefight to hold their line & SAVED hundreds of homes in Montecito.”
That was the news this morning about the horrific Thomas ...read more
A Nature News feature examines academic papers that have never been cited.
According to author Richard Van Noorden, by some estimates up to half of all papers have yet to receive their first citation 5 years after publication, and even 10% of Nobel Prizewinners’ papers go uncited.
However, Van Noorden reports that these estimates are far too high. For recent papers indexed on Web of Science (WoS), “records suggest that fewer than 10%” remain uncited, and even this is likely an ...read more
Pristimantis attenboroughi (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Sir David Frederick Attenborough, OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FLS, FZS, FSA, is the best. That sounds like an opinion, but it’s pretty much objective fact at this point. The British broadcaster and naturalist has been narrating the wonders of the natural world for over 50 years now, traveling to almost every country on Earth to do so.
His crowning achievement is a massive documentary series known si ...read more
In a recent Washington Post opinion piece, actor and playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda called on Congress to bring lasting relief and recovery to Puerto Rico where thousands remain without electricity or access to clean water nearly three months after Hurricane Maria made landfall.
In the interim, the Rincón chapter of the Surfrider Foundation’s Blue Water Task Force (BWTF) has stepped up its efforts to help communities undertake their own water quality testing and identify places ...read more
Jürgen Vogel is Ötzi the Iceman. (Credit: Port au Prince 24/Bilder)
From a block of ice to the silver screen; Ötzi the Iceman, an archaeological star, is getting his own feature film.
From German director Felix Randau, the movie is a fictionalized account of Ötzi’s life and eventual death at the hands of an unknown archer in the Alps. Though the story is mostly fictional, the clothing, props and setting were all recreated with the help of researchers fr ...read more
This painting (circa 1836) titled “Destruction” is one painting depicting in a five part series by Thomas Cole called “The Course of an Empire.” (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
At some time or another, every historian of Rome has been asked to say where we are, today, on Rome’s cycle of decline. Historians might squirm at such attempts to use the past but, even if history does not repeat itself, nor come packaged into moral lessons, it can deepen our sense of what it ...read more
This image shows Cassini’s last two orbital phases. The ring-grazing orbits are shown in gray (far left), while the Grand Finale orbits — during which Cassini’s collected unprecedented measurements of Saturn’s ionosphere — are shown in blue. The orange line shows Cassini’s final plunge into Saturn on September 15, 2017. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
In April of this year, NASA nudged the Cassini spacecraft into an orbit that took it through a narrow gap between ...read more
