Apollo 9 launched 50 years ago, on March 3, 1969, and it might be the most important but least celebrated of the early Apollo missions. In fact, it was so important to NASA’s ultimate lunar landing goal that the space agency had a series of contingency missions in place to ensure it could get as much data as possible if something went wrong.
Apollo 9’s mission wasn’t necessarily glamorous. Commander Jim McDivitt, Command Module Pilot (CMP) Dave Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot ...read more
Science fiction is a genre committed to the concept of "run before you can walk." Long before anyone knew whether heavier-than-air flight was possible, writers were imagining travel to other planets. By the time interplanetary space probes were a reality in the 1960s, the storytellers had long since moved on to thinking interstellar.
Today, two or three generations of happy nerds have grown up in a world saturated with science fiction TV shows and movies featuring the word "star" in their tit ...read more
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." The quote is so familiar that most people have no idea where it originally comes from (I'll admit, I had to look it up myself to be sure: It is Mediation XVII from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.) In recent years, though, the words have taken on new meaning, at least for those of us who are devoted to astronomical exploration. Any spa ...read more
You may have heard that dogs and their owners really do look alike. Now, new research has shown that owners and their pups often share personality traits, too.
A paper, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, says a dog's personality reflects the personality of its owner. It also explains that dogs experience personality changes similar to how humans do over the course of their lives.
Two researchers from Michigan State University surveyed the owners of 1,600 d ...read more
Susanne Hecker, Muki Haklay, Anne Bowser, Zen Makuch, Johannes Vogel & Aletta Bonn. (2018). Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy. University College London Press.
Scientific progress is intertwined with the triad of the state, the scientist, and the citizen, all of which are emphasized in the field of citizen science. Taking a largely European perspective, Citizen Science: Innovation in Open Science, Society and Policy by Hecker at al., is in ...read more
When New Horizons flew past Pluto and its moon Charon in 2015, it took a lot of pictures. From studying those images, scientists have recently realized that while both bodies are covered in craters, almost none of those craters are small, meaning there may not be many small bodies around to smash into them. This changes astronomers’ views of the Kuiper Belt, the region of small – but apparently not too small – rocky and icy bodies of which Pluto is a part.
No Tiny Crater ...read more
It has been a great week for humans banging on things around the solar system. Japan's Hayabusa2 probe touched down and grabbed a sample of asteroid Ryugu; NASA's InSight is hammering into the surface of Mars; and a private Israeli spacecraft named Beresheet is heading toward an April landing on the Moon. But we are just beginners at the game. Nature has been banging and moving things around in the solar system for billions of years--and doing it with impressive efficiency.
Case in point: ...read more
There are only so many hours in the day, and when work or school sucks up eight of them, it can be hard to squeeze in time for family, friends, exercise or binging Netflix. As a result, we often don’t get those eight hours of precious sleep during the week. But catching some extra z’s on the weekend can make up for it, right?
Wrong, say researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder. In a recent study, they found that catching up on sleep during the weekend doesn’t countera ...read more
It's easy to forget it, but much of the world is invisible to us. I don't mean that in the sense of things being really tiny, or in any metaphorical way. No, most of the world is literally invisible.
That's because what we call visible light is actually a tiny sliver of the much greater electromagnetic spectrum. The rainbow we see sits in the middle of a vast continuum of wavelengths, including everything from high energy gamma and ultraviolet radiation to much lower infrared and radio wa ...read more
