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"The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, or falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries." -Carl Sagan One of the greatest things we can do -- when we study and learn the story of the Universe -- is simply to tell that story, as best as modern science allows us to. Earlier this week, I had a chance to do this in front of a small, intimate audience at the Hand-Eye Supply Curiosity Club here in Portland…
Pretty wild news this morning - a meteor shower over the Central Russian cities of Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk has caused hundreds of injuries and damaged buildings. It is not connected with tonight's (very!) near-pass of asteroid 2012 DA14. Thanks to the prevalence of dashboard cams in Russia, there's some amazing footage already circulating. The web's resident expert on all things heavenly, Phil Plait, has the details and analysis.
"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please." -Mark Twain I am unimpressed with speculations that have no basis in fact, but if you can show how your claims are factually grounded and arrived at, they're certainly worth a listen to. And if your facts, logic and extrapolations are sound, you might even, as Sarah Jarosz sings, Tell Me True. Of course, if they're a little suspect instead, you can either lead people astray, or alternatively, create some of the best humor and satire ever created. This weekend, I proudly introduce to you a series of nature videos by YouTube user…
"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it." -John Archibald Wheeler Sometimes, things get difficult. Sometimes, there are challenges you have to face that you never even expected, much less were prepared for. And sometimes, it seems like there's no point in even holding on to hope that things will get better. But as long, as The National would tell you, as you're no Runaway, you've still got something worth striving for. Even if there's something newer, shinier, and more powerful than you. Image credit: NASA / Hubble Space Telescope. Even on Mars. Nine years (and three…
“Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements— a quintessence— that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man’s spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that’s not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there’s a little starlight in each of us.” -Lisa Kleypas Ah, but what if you did want the scientific view of starlight? After all, it's through the very stars themselves that we've unveiled some of the greatest secrets of the Universe. Image (mosaic) credit: Nick Risinger. But while the stars of the night…
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man." -Mark Twain While it's hard to imagine for me now that I have one, there are plenty of people out there who have never known the rewards and joys that come with rescuing an animal. This week, I present to you a song by six future Soundgarden-and-Pearl Jam members back when they were part of the band Temple of the Dog, Call Me a Dog. And while there are many internet jokes out there about dogs driving cars... Image credit: Kathy of http://www.petswelcome.com…
"The man's a born straggler... another lucky exception to the rules of natural selection. A million years ago he would've been an easy snack for a saber-toothed tiger." -Carl Hiaasen Welcome to the latest Messier Monday, where each week we take a look at one of Charles Messier's original catalogue of 110 deep-sky objects that comet-hunters might easily confuse with those transient passers-by in our Solar System. Image credit: Greg Scheckler, from his 2008 Messier marathon, where he nabbed 105/110. Quite to the contrary, each of the 110 objects in the Messier catalogue are (semi-)permanent…
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, 'Wow! What a Ride!'” -Hunter S. Thompson For those of you who've never experienced exactly what it feels like to alter your perceptions, and for those of you who have but don't want to spend hours and hours experiencing the effects, your options have traditionally been limited. Perhaps a song might provide a window into the experience for you, such as M. Ward's…
“We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.” -George Bernard Shaw All that is real about ourselves is nothing to be ashamed about; quite to the contrary, it's something to be eminently thankful for. This very existence is all we have, and while it's minuscule compared to the entire Universe, it required the entire Universe to bring us to the point where it's possible for us to exist. What do I mean by…
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.” -Niels Bohr One of the most amazing recent technological innovations is the advent of 3D Printing, where any shaped or textured object can be accurately reproduced with the right software and printing materials. The things that I've seen made so far have been so creative that I thought the right song to take you through what I'm about to show you is Ween's upbeat (and amusing) song, Voodoo Lady. Over at the fantastic do-it-yourself website, Instructables, they're currently having a competition called Make it Real,…
"When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old." -Mark Twain Welcome to yet another installment of Messier Monday, where each week, I'll pick one of the 110 Messier Objects -- deep-sky objects catalogued to avoid confusion for comet hunters -- to highlight for you. Image(s) credit: SEDS -- http://messier.seds.org/. So far, we've taken a look at a supernova remnant, a young open star cluster, and an active star-forming nebula, a testament to the great diversity of these faint, fuzzy objects that might be easily confused with a comet. Today…
"You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it." -Henry Louis Gates When it comes to stars, their fates are very well known. Every single star that's massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium in its core will someday run out of fuel and die. Image credit: NASA, ESA, F. Paresce, R. O'Connell, & the HST WFC3 Science Oversight Committee. The very brightest and most massive stars -- about 1-in-800 of all stars -- will die in a spectacular, core-collapse supernova when their core burns fuel all the way through iron and finally runs out of room to go. This…
"It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." -Joseph Campbell One of the bravest things that was ever done with the Hubble Space Telescope was to find a patch of sky with absolutely nothing in it -- no bright stars, no nebulae, and no known galaxies -- and observe it. Not just for a few minutes, or an hour, or even for a day. But orbit-after-orbit, for a huge amount of time, staring off into the nothingness of empty space, recording image after image of pure darkness. What would we find, out beyond the limits of what…
"Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not." -Galileo Galilei All of science is rooted in the idea that natural phenomena can be explained naturally, and that if we want to know how anything in the Universe works, all we need to do is ask the Universe the right questions, and the answers will appear. So what about the question of the night sky, and why it appears to rotate the way it does? Image credit: Peter Michaud (Gemini Observatory), AURA, NSF. There are two straightforward explanations for…
"What a shot by Happy Gilmore! <aside> Who the hell is Happy Gilmore?" -Announcer, from Happy Gilmore As I prepare to write this, it occurs to me that some of you may not have seen the greatest* movie of all time, Happy Gilmore. The movie begins with a montage of Happy's disastrous and violent childhood, where he -- a wannabe hockey player -- is raised by his very sweet grandma (played by Frances Bay, RIP one year today) while the you're treated to the Lynyrd Skynyrd classic, Tuesday's Gone. Happy has an amazingly powerful slap shot, which isn't quite enough to land him with a minor…
"Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes; everybody knows." -Leonard Cohen As you know, last week I took my first week off of the year, and went on a trip to Glacier National Park, which was my very first time there. Although I've spent a lot of time in the mountains, including some pretty icy and snowy places, I'd never walked on an actual glacier before. All of that was about to change…
"I have announced this star as a comet, but since it is not accompanied by any nebulosity and, further, since its movement is so slow and rather uniform, it has occurred to me several times that it might be something better than a comet. But I have been careful not to advance this supposition to the public." -Giuseppe Piazzi, discoverer of Ceres, the first Asteroid Out beyond Mars, but not quite out as far as Jupiter, a collection of thousands of rocky objects, ranging in size from pebbles all the way up to the size of Texas, lies the asteroid belt. Image credit: David Minton and Renu…
"It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see." -Winston Churchill We've come a long way in this Universe. Over the past 13.7 billion years, we've formed the light elements out of a sea of protons and neutrons, cooled and expanded to form neutral atoms for the first time, gravitationally collapsed hydrogen and helium gas clouds to form the first stars, borne witness to generations of stellar deaths and rebirths, lived through the formation of hundreds of billions of galaxies and the clustering together of thousands or more galaxies into clusters, filaments,…
“If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.” -Dwight Eisenhower One of the greatest feelings is the freedom to travel, whether by your own power or a mechanical motor, far faster than your own legs can take you. Kimya Dawson understands how delightful this is (and how much is missing when you can't have it), as you can likely tell from her song, My Bike I've always loved the feeling of biking, fast, along a deserted road, feeling the wind rush past me and seeing the world go by. Image credit: Flickr…
"We don’t understand how a single star forms, yet we want to understand how 10 billion stars form." -Carlos Frenk The Universe has been around for a long time: nearly 14 billion years, to the best of our knowledge. When it was very young, there were absolutely zero stars in it, while today, there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which contains anywhere from a few billion to many trillions of stars. Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA) - ESA / Hubble Collaboration The galaxy shown above, NGC 2841, is very similar to our own Milky Way. Approximately the…