Around 2.4 billion years ago, a massive star in the Sagitta Constellation collapsed to form a black hole, and fired gamma rays into space. Astronomers are calling the explosion “BOAT” — the “brightest of all time.” The gamma rays arrived at our planet last week, and wer[...]
Archive for the ‘Science’ Category
October 4th, 2022 - 12:32 pm § in Science
Why can’t time go backwards?
Want to read something that isn’t about politics? Courtesy of BBC News, I have just the article for you! It begins, “When Isaac Newton published his famous Principia in 1687, his three elegant laws of motion solved a lot of problems. … But these laws brought to physics a new probl[...]
October 4th, 2022 - 1:22 am § in Science
Swede wins Nobel Medicine Prize for tracing ancient DNA
Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo, 67, won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “discoveries that underpin our understanding of how modern day people evolved from extinct ancestors at the dawn of human history” including sequencing the first Neanderthel genome,[...]
October 1st, 2022 - 11:41 pm § in Science
Close-up photo of asteroid
This is a photo of the asteroid hit by NASA’s “DART” mission on Monday, September 26, 2022, just before impact. The story (read it here) says the egg-shaped asteroid is 530 feet in diameter. (Wikipedia says 560 feet, here.) My question is, in which direction, since it’s not r[...]
October 1st, 2022 - 11:06 pm § in Science
How it was proved the earth spins on an axis
Writer Erik Larson (profile here) described it as follows: “In 1627, a very brave if melodramatic German mathematician, Joseph Furtenbach, aimed a loaded cannon into the sky in preparation for an experiment he hoped would provide the first real-world test of another of Galileo’s theories[...]
September 29th, 2022 - 12:01 am § in Science
Why doesn’t Seattle get hurricanes?
Because we have too many Democrats here, and hurricanes prefer Republicans. Hee hee, just kidding. Actually, because the Pacific Ocean is too cold, and West Coast winds blow in the wrong direction. Hurricanes are an equatorial belt phenomenon, not least because they get their energy from warm water,[...]
September 26th, 2022 - 6:29 pm § in Science
SPLATTT!!! Spacecraft hits asteroid (video)
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September 21st, 2022 - 1:27 pm § in Science
PHOTOGRAPHY: Neptune’s rings
Top image below, brought to you by the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, you may ask why Voyager 2 photos — bottom image below — don’t show the rings. After all, Voyager 2 was millions of miles closer than JWST is. The answer is Webb has infrared cameras and Voyager 2 doesn’t,[...]
Study suggests “Little Engine” psychology works
It’s been a long time since children’s stories were read to me, in a previous millenium, before I turned into an old fossil. But those stories, which have a moral and are meant to teach you something, tend stick in your mind. A popular and enduring children’s story is “The Li[...]
Technically, nobody is too stupid to be a U.S. senator
Seriously, the only qualifications to be a U.S. senator are you must “have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and … when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State …” (U.S. Const., Art. I, §3). The Framers intentionally gave[...]