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
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine