For five months out of every year, the citizens of Rjukan live in the shadow of neighboring mountains. That won’t be the case this year.
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When things don’t add up, it’s a great sign that something amazing is right around the corner. Every Thursday, we take an older post from the Starts With A Bang archives […]
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory released a video that captured multiple ‘sun tornadoes,’ or plasma moving across the sun’s surface.
How the most powerful telescope ever built will owe its successes and discoveries to scientists who’ll never get the glory. “The soul without imagination is what an observatory would be without […]
You’ll frequently hear people say “the science is settled.” Scientifically speaking, can it ever be? “All the problems of the world could be settled easily if men were only willing to […]
Now that the craft is officially in interstellar space, it should continue to send data back to Earth for another 12 years or so, barring any unforeseen complications. Understandably, scientists are excited.
Never mind Comet ISON: If all goes well, in January the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe will “wake up” in preparation for a rendezvous with Comet 67-P, currently hanging out in the vicinity of Jupiter.
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science.
Across the long distance of a clear Atlantic Ocean, the Blundell Hunter lands on the shore of Old Harbour, Jamaica. The ship had docked two days prior in Morant Bay, […]
A few weeks ago Mayor of London Boris Johnson said some questionable things about IQ tests and the benefits of greed, income inequality and shaking boxes of cornflakes. Dorothy Bishop wrote an […]
They’re the first major finds by NASA’s X-ray space observatory, which went into orbit last year. Scientists expect it to find many more in the near future.
For younger Americans, the President might very well be most vividly remembered for the way he died.
It is so hot in Death Valley that you can fry an egg outside using nothing but the sun and a skillet.
Does it reveal the location of the doldrums?
“The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.” – A. Bartlett Giamatti
It’s easier than you might think, and we’ve been doing it for over a century. “The doctors realized in retrospect that even though most of these dead had also suffered from […]
Harvard researchers took inspiration from the cooling ability of skin for their microfluidic circulatory system, which can save energy and lower air-conditioning bills.
The end of the world has been coming for quite some time. As Reza Aslan points out in Zealot, Jesus Christ was not the only End Times preacher with stock […]
I was just fascinated watching these guys doing coding during the day and scraping peyote off cactuses at night and going to raves until morning.
I feel this tendency to come up with an evolutionary explanation for basically everything under the sun is not needed.
Hey, all you natural food fans. You die-hard anti-Monsanto opponents of genetically modified food, who say it’s dangerous because, well, it’s unnatural. You may want to think twice before you […]
To the limits of our observable Universe and well beyond, here’s what we know the minimum size of the Universe must be, along with how we know it. “The greatest enemy […]
It’s the first Virgo Cluster galaxy to rise over the horizon in the Northern Hemisphere, and you can find it tonight! “The image is more than an idea. It is a […]
How the mis-application of the Anthropic Principle has led factions of scientists away from the search for a natural, physical explanation of our Universe, and why that’s bad for everyone. […]
Have you heard about the Echinacea that was actually ground-up Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive exotic weed in Asia and Africa which doesn’t do much for a cold but causes […]
In a previous post, we set American Walt Whitman against Frenchman Arthur Rimbaud. Based on your feedback, Rimbaud won the first set narrowly. So now on to set #2: war.
Do black holes exist? The world’s most famous scientist vs. the actual science. “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the Universe, why it is as it is […]
The picture above is a composite of 25 images recorded in extreme ultraviolet light by the Solar Dynamics Observatory over the course of the past year.
When I was 15, my geography teacher almost ruined maps for me. He stubbornly avoided what fascinated me about cartography: the why and how of those borderlines that cut and […]
It takes a fair amount to get my blood boiling at 5:21 a.m., but an NPR Morning Edition interview with a new savior of investigative journalism, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, […]