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If we knew all we do about math and physics, but had never seen the heavens, what would we conclude? “Both the solutions must be rejected, and as these are […]

Saturn, Venus, Mars, Mercury and Jupiter will all be visible in the August night skies, as will the annual Perseid meteors. A number of nebulas will also be easy to find among the constellations.

Why the kind of knowledge you get by asking the Universe questions about itself is the most valuable type of knowledge there is. “I’m also uncomfortable with dogmatic believers; to my […]

The spacecraft currently in residence near Saturn will position itself to capture what our planet looks like from almost 900 million miles away. It’s the first-ever intentional photo session from deep space, which means we have time to dress up. 

In the history of discovery, most discoverers struggled to recognize their discovery. The value of Gregor Mendel’s famous pea experiments were only recognized decades after his death. Without the theory […]

Ron Miller has painted the planets as if they were the same distance from Earth as the Moon, in order to demonstrate their size.

While this is one violent storm, scientists were actually the most surprised by how much the hurricane seems to resemble one on Earth.

According to a new study published in this week’s Nature, icy particles inside the rings erode into the upper atmosphere and eventually form rain water that falls on parts of the planet.

Images from NASA’s Cassini probe show a weather phenomenon that’s never been observed on any other planet in the solar system, including ours.

Enter a rapidly changing world where a passionate scientist by the name of Isaac Newton burns political bridges in London, a royal astronomer, Edmond Halley, seeks a powerful formula from […]

1. Every Big Idea Was First A Crazy Idea Fred Guterl, executive editor of Scientific American, does a nice job of highlighting some of the crazy ideas presented at this year’s TED […]

Inspired by a comic strip, a geneticist has created a text editor that restricts writers to the 1000 most commonly used words in the English language.

            You know how sometimes when you put your foot in your mouth and say something really stupid, you try to recover but only stammer out something even dumber and […]

NASA’s Cassini has taken the first-ever high-resolution shot of a river and its tributaries on a planetary body that’s not Earth.

Thirty-five years after their launch, the two Voyager deep space probes are about to enter interstellar space, while still transmitting data back to Earth.

Their are other places in the solar system which might harbor life, say astronomers. Given probable budget cuts, some scientists are criticizing NASA’s singular focus on the Red Planet. 

Tropical lakes of methane recently discovered on the surface of Titan hint at subsurface oases, which could produce compounds analogous to proteins and information-carrying molecules. 

As I’m writing this post, NASA’s latest Mars mission – the Mars Science Laboratory, also known as Curiosity – is just hours away from its destination. By the time you […]

Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon can take off at a moment’s notice and escape from pursuers into space. And can land on almost any patch of ground. Why can’t we do that in 2012? The problem is the puny power of the chemical rocket.

NASA scientists have discovered a thin strip of oxygen in the atmosphere of Dione, one of Saturn’s 60 moons. It seems to be a rare case of oxygen existing without the support of live organisms. 

If you don’t like the weather in New England, wait a minute. So goes the saying that is loosely attributed to Mark Twain. The same cannot be said of the […]

Based on current discovery rates, we will have discovered thousands of exoplanets by 2020. But how can we concentrate on habitable ones? One astrobiologist proposes a unique solution.

This column (flagged by one of our eagle-eyed editors) by Kenneth Rogoff on “rethinking the growth imperative” is incredibly puzzling. Rogoff, a Harvard economics professor and former IMF chief economist, […]

What sends chills and thrills up your spine just by looking at it on a museum wall? Fright, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. But here is perhaps the scariest painting of them all.

A European space telescope has found 10 previously unknown alien planets, all of which are gaseous like Saturn or Jupiter. They boost the count of extrasolar planets to 565.

As part of its “Works & Process” series of events, the Guggenheim Museum in New York is presenting a lecture by legendary physicist, mathematician and futurist Freeman Dyson of Princeton’s […]

Ices stripped off a long-lost moon may have provided the raw materials for Saturn’s rings and inner satellites before the Titan-twin slammed into its mother planet, new research shows.

It’s long been speculated that the largest moon of Saturn, Titan, has large volcanoes made of ice. In 2005, it was thought that one of these ice volcanoes had been […]

Now that AGU is behind us and that I’ve waded through a lot of grading (over the weekend: 4 sets of labs and one each of papers and homework), I […]

We’ve found out the winner of 2010 Pliny for volcanic event of the year yesterday, so now let’s look back at the entire year in volcanic activity. It was a […]