blogs.discovermagazine — I never get tired of the stunning pictures being sent to Earth from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. This one is particularly cool: It’s a little weird, isn’t it? What you’re seeing is sunset over some mountains on the Moon, with only the peaks popping up into the sunlight. It might help...
scienceblogs — "Don't blame yourself. The apocalypse wasn't your fault. Actually, it was just as much your fault as it was anyone else's. Come to think of it, if you're an American, it was probably about 80-90 percent more your fault than the average human. But don't let that get you down....
universetoday — The 'face' on Mars, a popular landform in Cydonia Region on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaHere's a picture you probably won't see in the tabloid racks while waiting in line at the grocery store. This is the famous "Face on Mars," and is the closest image ever of the this...
blogs.discovermagazine — The Australian Vaccination Network, an antivax organization fronted by Meryl Dorey, has long been an antiscience group devoted to spreading any kind of nonsensical rhetoric they can. The good news? Now they’re being called out on it. As The Sceptic’s Book of Poo-Poo extensively documents, the media used to be pretty...
blogs.discovermagazine — I just found out that video of my talk at w00tstock has been posted on YouTube. The quality is a little shaky, since it was a handheld video taken from a distance back, so some of the pictures may be hard to discern, but I think it suffices to get...
nasawatch — Kepler Mission - Errare Humanum Est, Natalie Batalha Kepler Co-Investigator, Beyond The Cradle "Should NASA screen everything that the team plans to say in public? Should we, the Kepler team, screen everything our colleagues plan to say in public? I think that the best we can do is ask our...
universetoday — It’s time once again for another Where In The Universe Challenge. This image was sent in by UT reader Brian Hinson. Name where in the Universe this image was taken and give yourself extra points if you can name exactly what it is. Post your guesses in the...
universetoday — Klingon vanity license plate, via Charven.comSince "Star Trek: The Experience" is no longer open, here's the next best thing. A company is getting ready to provide self-guided tours of the Jenolan Caves west of Sydney, Australia, and one of the languages soon available for the tours is Klingon. ...
scienceblogs — "`It's quite hard to destroy the Earth.' Does that statement make anyone else nervous? I mean, does that sound like experience talking?" -from the comments on the LHC at slashdot Last week, I started an open thread, giving you the chance to ask about how certain we were about the validity of...
universetoday — A Russian spacewalker works outside the Pirs docking compartment after beginning the first Expedition 24 spacewalk. Credit: NASA TVTwo Expedition 24 cosmonauts conducted a six-and-a-half hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station earlier today, outfitting the newest module for future dockings of Russian vehicles. Flight Engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and...
planetary — This news is no surprise, but I think it's the first such discovery I've heard of: the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) team has identified a new crater on the Moon, one that wasn't there when Apollo 15 flew over, and which doesn't correspond to any known human artifact impact...
planetary — Although there's no details visible in the image below, it's still a pretty impressive feat. During an annual checkout of its instruments, New Horizons turned back to snap a photo of Jupiter, which it passed by more than three years ago. The planet is now 16.3 astronomical units...
blogs.discovermagazine — I was a big Green Lantern fan when I was a kid. It may have been my favorite comic book, and I used to sneak into my brother’s room and read every issue he got. I’m a grownup now, more or less, but sometimes those comic book heroes still get...
blog.professorastronomy — In the past few hours, many news outlets have posted stories claiming that NASA's Kepler Mission has discovered hundreds of Earth-like planets. Here's a reasonable version of the news posted at SpaceRef.com. These stories are not based on an official announcement, but rather a talk given by one of the Kepler...
universetoday — This image zooms into a small portion of Kepler's full field of view -- an expansive, 100-square-degree patch of sky in our Milky Way galaxy. (NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech)Mainstream media (MSM) is funny. Well, maybe funny isn't the right word, especially when they hose things up and create a story when there...
universetoday — Doppler data on asteroid 1999 RQ36 from Goldstone. Credit: NASAAsteroid trackers from Spain have upgraded the chance that asteroid 1999 RQ36 has a one-in-a-thousand chance of impacting the Earth in the year 2182. Previous estimates gave a 1 in 1,400 chance that this asteroid could strike Earth sometime between...
planetary — Here are two newly processed portraits of Saturn, showing the planet just after its equinox; the shadows of the rings are widening in a band that is slowly moving downward across the southern hemisphere. The rings appear pretty dark, since the Sun strikes them at a very low angle....
blogs.discovermagazine — Graphing variables is a critical skill in science. If something depends on something else — like the speed of sounds depends on air density, or the surface gravity of an object depends on its size — then if you plot the two things on a graph, you should see a...
universetoday — Lots of sites have posted this recently, but its so good its worth showing up one more time. This is a clip from a British comedy show "That Mitchell and Webb Look," that debunks the notion that the Moon landings were faked, in a way that only British TV...
blogs.discovermagazine — [I know I already posted this, but the video of the trailer had to be taken down, fixed, and put back up, so I'm reposting to give everyone a chance to actually watch it. Everything works now. Yay! Also, it's up on reddit (actually twice) and Fark, too.] Finally, at last,...
astroengine — For this special little planet, today has been a very big day. Although we’ve speculated that planets the size of Earth must exist elsewhere in the cosmos, it wasn’t until one of the co-investigators working with the Kepler Space Telescope said he had statistical evidence that worlds of the approximate...
universetoday — My good friend (and forum co-admin) Phil Plait has been working on a super secret project for a few months. But now the project has been revealed in all its glory… it's a television show called "Bad Universe". Phil made the announcement a couple of days ago, but had to...
universetoday — Nancy and I thought Universe Today was getting a little long in the tooth – its design was so 2008 – so we updated it. Hurray! The goal here was simplicity, so we've cleaned things up, threw things out that didn't really matter any more, and tried to give it...
universetoday — Just a few short years ago, even the thought of capturing an astronomy anomaly with what's considered an "amateur telescope" was absolutely unthinkable. Who were we to even try to do what great minds postulated and even greater equipment resolved? I'll tell you who… Bernhard Hubl. ...
nasawatch — Data Leak: Galaxy Rich in Earth-Like Planets, Science "NASA didn't plan it this way, but earlier this month a co-investigator on the Kepler satellite mission in the hunt for other Earth-like planets announced to a conference in Oxford, England, that "planets like our own Earth are out there. Our Milky Way...