Making Contact
Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Making Contact
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Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Making Contact
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Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on NASA Woes: Hubble's Replacement Behind Schedule; Shuttle Cracks Found
Hubble’s successor will be late, and over-budget. So concluded a NASA panel this week that investigate the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s next big thing, intended to survey the skies in infrared light with its 18-segment mirror. The word all along has been that James Webb would launch in 2014 at a cost of $5 billion, but the independent review (pdf) concluded that the earliest possible launch would be September 2015, and at a cost of more like $6.5 billion. The report raised fear ...read more
Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Bad Astronomy audio book now available
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Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Your Next Sponge Bath May Come From a Robot Named Cody
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Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Trouble.
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Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Ancient Rocks Show Oxygen Was Abundant Long Before Complex Life Arose
A huge spike in the Earth’s atmospheric oxygen about 800 million years ago, the story goes, paved the way for the Cambrian explosion a couple hundred million years later, and with it the rise of complex life. But a new study out in Nature says that picture is incomplete. Researchers found evidence of substantial oxygen 1.2 billion years ago, meaning that the conditions needed for complex life appeared much earlier than scientists knew, and that perhaps something else was required to set of ...read more
Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on More bad news about the Congressional Energy Committee
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Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on The Pi-on
I am in love with this comment and want to have its babies: pi appears as a constant in many formula of physics. General relativity says that it isn’t constant. Is it the origin of the pi particle, aka pion? A curmudgeonly literalist might, when faced with a question such as this, harrumph a simple “No.” A more loquacious sort might explain that general relativity does not say that π is not a contstant. Pi is not a parameter of physics like the fine-structure constant, whi ...read more
Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Tariffs, not trade?
In the the 19th century the Democratic party, rooted in large part among Southern planters who were dependent on exports of commodities and imports of finished goods, was the party of free trade. The northern Whigs, and later the Republicans, were the party of tariffs. They were the faction which drew support from the industry of the North which benefited from protection against European competitors. The Republican support for tariffs and Democratic opposition persisted into the early 20th ...read more
Posted on Categories Discover MagazineLeave a comment on Happy 10th Anniversary to the Weekly Volcanic Activity Report
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