Ejecta rays point to the problem with ‘ideal’ models
The PNAS Journal Club points to an interesting research study on craters: “Journal Club: Researchers may’ve finally solved mystery of crater ray formation”.
The PNAS Journal Club points to an interesting research study on craters: “Journal Club: Researchers may’ve finally solved mystery of crater ray formation”.
Two years ago this month, I asked, “Why do universities cover up high-profile harassment? Look for the money”.
Oliver Morton thought that the recent Proxima Centauri exoplanet news would be bigger; he ponders why he was wrong: “It will be a long time before you see an...
How can professors get away with years of sexual harassment or abuse of graduate students without their universities taking any action?
Many people know the story that Carl Sagan was rejected for membership in the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. The story has given rise to ...
Ars Technica has a long article in honor of the anniversary of the Apollo 13 by writer Lee Hutchinson, giving background to the famous accident that the movi...
Popular Mechanics asks, “How Many People Does It Take to Colonize Another Star System?”. The basic problem is that a multigenerational star voyage requires t...
The Bad Astronomer explains this week’s new Kepler-assisted astronomy findings: “The Sky May Be Filled with Earth-like Planets”.
From Markus Hammonds at io9: “The Hunt for Alien Megastructures”. Turns out that people are already using observational data to try to identify planet-scale ...
Rand Simberg: “Should NASA Be Doing More Asteroids?”
Adam Mann of Wired describes the interesting plans of Deep Space Industries, working on the idea of how to make money from asteroid mining: “New Asteroid Min...
Maggie Koerth-Baker, on “How space radiation hurts astronauts”. I did not know about this part:
Moon rock is expensive here on Earth, but on the moon it’s as cheap as dirt. So maybe future moon colonists could make stuff out of it using 3-d printing tec...
Adam Mann in Wired covers Elon Musk’s ideas about putting people on Mars: “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony”.
Steve Silberman provides an in-depth interview of Lee Billings, in the middle of writing a book about the discovery of extrasolar planets: “Five Billion Year...
The headline of this Guardian story really says it all: “Priceless Tibetan Buddha statue looted by Nazis was carved from meteorite”.
Popular Mechanics has an article that goes through some of the basics of space flight design principles: “What would a starship actually look like?”
Nature has a short opinion piece about NASA’s astrobiology initiative Lazcano:Hand:2012.
From Alexis Madrigal: “Hey, brother, can you spare a Hubble?”
My name is Corey Hayes. I am in my final year of Anthropology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. My Minor's English, and I've been told I have a bent...
Popular Science writer Tom Clynes gives us a long profile of Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who became a lightning rod for criticism after she authored an article claim...
On the issue of alien cyanobacteria, I recommend David Dobbs: “Aliens riding meteorites: Arsenic redux or something new?”
Yesterday, some commercial space news made the NY Times (“Space Tourism: One Giant Leap for Researchers” and Wired (“Scientists Buy Rocket Rides to Suborbita...
Remembering Ham, 50 years later: “The chimp that took America into space.”
Vintage Space is a blog written by a historian of spaceflight, which has lately been focusing on the development of landing systems in the Mercury, Gemini an...
I wrote a short post about the arsenate-bacteria story last weekend; in the meantime the story has developed. Carl Zimmer ran a long story early this week, r...
Rosie Redfield begins to disassemble the NASA-sponsored “alien life forms” story:
The Age:
Hmmm….
Charles Stross: “How habitable is the Earth?”
Sophie and I went out last week to see the International Space Station and Space Shuttle as they flew over just after sunset. Very impressive brightness, and...
The Freakonomics blog ran a Q-and-A with astronaut Buzz Aldrin.
Could the first Mars colony be a retirement community? Lawrence Krauss thinks so:
The LA Times had a very nice article last week with reminiscences of engineers who built the Saturn V rocket:
Thanks for your post on the Saturn V. I remember watching the first shuttle launch, and being surprised at how it jumped off the pad. I had become used to ...
Rand Simberg (Transterrestrial Musings) gives a history of efforts to redirect NASA, and an alternative blueprint for the future, in a long essay in The New ...
Worth reading from last week if you haven’t seen it: The Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe’s lament on NASA’s unfulfilled promise, “One Giant Leap to Nowhere”. Mo...
Simulations have shown that ejecta from ancient impacts on Earth may have landed safely on the Moon, allowing future astronauts to search for ancient traces ...