Scientific American usually does a great job — but today, I suspect their reporters weren’t listening very closely when they wrote this post: “Texas vote moves evolution to the top of the class.” I listened this afternoon to the Texas Board of Education as its members revised the state’s science teaching standards, and it sounded to [...]
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 [...]