It’s a wonderful thing when kids are invited to get excited about science. And with the launch of the space shuttle Endeavor on Friday, NASA is throwing open the door. As it heads to the International Space Station, Endeavor will be toting living things besides seven astronauts: butterfly larvae, young spiders, and the nectar and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
