Showing posts with label Outta this world. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Outta this world. Show all posts
Sunday, May 19, 2024

Dream big, young scientists

›
Looking back through old journals for something entirely different, I found the following research proposal that I wrote in Oct-Nov of 1996,...
Thursday, February 18, 2021

Geosonnet 66

›
A Solo smuggler must hide his freight. Hidden compartments store his shady wares. So when a mineral conceals hydrate There must be secret st...
Thursday, August 06, 2015

A one-way ticket to an unsuspecting Kepler 452b?

›
There has been a bit in the science press about the newly discovered exoplanet, Kepler 452b. This related to the observation that it is in ...
Friday, May 01, 2015

Carnival of Space #403

›
Back in the days before Tumblr and facebook and twitter, people wrote blogs, read other blogs, and collate series of posts about common them...
Thursday, November 20, 2014

The wrong kind of Bang

›
In science education and popularization, there is a delicate balance that must be struck between overcomplicating and oversimplifying. Insu...
Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Total eclipse of the train

›
Tokyo is a busy city.  Thirty-six million people go call the region home, and go about their industrious, detailed lives with an energy an...
Friday, August 29, 2014

Geosonnet 7

›
The Schrödinger bacteria’s Barsoom, Where robots scan the wadi of the Styx . There died, or never lived a microbe bloom When déjà vu ...
Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Don’t weaponize space

›
On the Planetary Society  website , the normally responsible and pro-science Planetary Society has posted an opinion piece by Louis Freedm...
1 comment:
Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Alien beyond comprehension

›
When an astronomer says a far-off planetary system is like ours , what he means is that it is completely different.  For example, see the r...
Thursday, December 05, 2013

The planets xkcd forgot

›
 A recent cartoon/poster on xkcd tries to estimate what the population of habitable zone planets in our stellar neighborhood looks like. U...
Friday, April 05, 2013

Why deflecting asteroids is a really bad idea

›
In the aftermath of the Chelyabinsk fireball last month, there have been increasing calls to identify asteroids on a collision course with ...
2 comments:
Tuesday, November 01, 2011

Not "Too Big to Fail"

›
Thursday, September 29, 2011

Viewing imaginary spacecraft from the ground

›
I read and watched a lot of science fiction when I was young. I don’t much any more, mostly because I’m too busy, but every now and then I ...
4 comments:
Tuesday, August 30, 2011

How odd is our solar system?

›
One of the most basic observations about the planets in our solar system is that there are two basic types. In the inner solar system, we h...
3 comments:
Wednesday, April 06, 2011

Radiation: reactor vs space

›
This plot , from exomaria , compares the relative radiation doses from various reactor accidents to that found on the surface of the Jovian ...
1 comment:
Thursday, February 10, 2011

Further consideration of the Kepler planets

›
A few days ago , I posted that a brief analysis of the size distribution of the Kepler planets suggests that the size distribution of planet...
1 comment:
Tuesday, February 08, 2011

Our planets are weird

›
The Kepler data release has delivered a huge amount of data on planets orbiting stars in our galaxy. This survey is designed to detect plan...
3 comments:
Monday, October 25, 2010

Meteorite tea, and the failures of genius

›
In the early 1970’s, Io, the innermost large moon of Jupiter, was somewhat of an enigma. Unlike Europa and Ganymede, it did not exhibit wat...
3 comments:
Sunday, September 05, 2010

Chlorine á gogo

›
There is a Universe Today article on the lack of organics found by the Voyager missions, which suggests that the chlorinated organics origi...
4 comments:
Saturday, September 04, 2010

Choice magazine to consumers: don’t eat white dwarfs

›
There is a Choice Magazine report advocating for stoplight rating of foods, to help consumers eat more healthily. Their rating system uses...
3 comments: