Silly astronauts. Space travel is for tardigrades!
The world’s space agencies go to great lengths to protect human beings entering the deep frozen vaccuum of space. The prevailing belief has been that nothing could survive the ultra-cold, oxygen-deprived and radiation-intense conditions beyond Earth’s atmosphere.
Enter tardigrades: oblong invertebrates about a millimeter in length that can visit space, return to Earth, and [...]
I enjoy writing about astronomy exactly for the reason I once feared it: there’s so much we don’t know. There’s rarely any shame in asking about the nature of a black hole, for example, because scientists are grappling with it too. Usually, if I get confused while writing an astronomy story, it’s because I’ve stumbled [...]
Bats are in the news twice this week for two very different reasons: more has been revealed about their endearing social graces, and more is now understood about their unique vulnerability to windmills.
University of Maryland researchers announce in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that big brown bats keep [...]
Humans build fences. Dogs water fire hydrants. And new evidence is suggesting the owls might use their own feces to demarcate their territories.
The new finding, reported in the August 20 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, hasn’t been reported very widely for the same reason my ever-astute editors at National Geographic News declined to publish it: [...]
Last week I was working on a story for National Geographic News about the discovery of the most recent supernova explosion in the Milky Way. The story posted on May 14, and you can find it here: Youngest Supernova in Milky Way Found. There was ample material available for reporting the story: a press release [...]
