World’s Strangest

The Mars Curiosity rover had its eyes wide open as it landed on the red planet. Meaning, the forward-facing camera was taking color images as it landed. In a couple of videos released by NASA, you can see the heat shield falling away from the rover, the heat shield slamming into the planet, and the [...]

Dr. Phil Plait has them all figured out. But you know, this could be made into a flowchart, with people being born flowing into the right circle, a trickle of people flowing from the right to the left, and because of the death rate, there would be outflow from both circles. Read plenty more geeky [...]

The vernal equinox is a day earlier than usual this year because we just had a leap day. Spring officially begins at 1:14 AM Tuesday in the US Eastern time zone, and that means Monday night in the western part of the country. Some people celebrate the equinox by standing a broom on end or [...]

Astronomers are keeping an eye on a moving body called asteroid 2011 AG5, which is scheduled to pass by Earth twice in the next few decades. As its trajectory is known so far, the odds of it hitting us are about 1 in 625. When AG5 passes us in February 2023, the Earth’s gravity will bend [...]

At the end of June this year, those who do this sort of thing will add an extra second to the world’s official clocks to keep us on the right track. This gets a bit detailed — which is where the fun is! — but in short it goes like this. We have two systems to [...]

Last week, Phil Plait posted his year-end gallery of the best pictures taken from space. Now you can see his picks for the best pictures of deep space, really deep, like these galaxies that are 300 million light years away. Because they’re big, sometimes galaxies get close together. Too close. Close enough that their gravity can [...]

Our ideas about the Moon — what it’s made of and how it got there, and even how we can use its energy — have changed rapidly over the last half-century. You know, since we started sending people there. The newest confirmed findings from lunar rocks reveals that our nearest neighbor is wetter then we [...]

I just learned a lot about sunspots from Dr. Phil Plait. He’s quite excited about NASA footage that shows the formation of a cluster of sunspots earlier this year. Sunspots are actually regions of slightly cooler material at the Sun’s surface. Hot plasma (ionized gas, stripped of one electron or more) rises from the solar interior, [...]

(YouTube link) Today, for the first time in history, humans can see the entire sun. In October 2006, NASA launched a pair of twin spacecraft into space. Called STEREO — Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory — they traveled in opposite directions, one ahead and the other behind the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. The goal was [...]

The final flight of the space shuttle Discovery will begin on November 1. One of the duties of the crew is to test Robonaut 2, a human-sized robot that may one day work on the International Space Station. The robot — I wonder if they’ll call it R2? — is an experiment to test how such [...]