space
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The Northern lights as you’ve never seen them before
As the International Space Station orbits Earth, it snaps images from a still camera affixed to its underside. String them together, and you get views of terrestrial phenomena as you've never seen them before. In this case, it’s the Aurora Borealis. The sun is in an active phase right now, leading to displays of "Northern" […]
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Looks like we might get a do-over Earth after all
A research team at Chile's La Silla Observatory has found a new crop of 50 exoplanets, at least one of which is in the "habitable zone" (i.e. an Earthlike distance from the sun). HD 85512 b is rocky instead of gaseous, big but not too big, and preliminary observations suggest an average surface temperature of a balmy 77 degrees F -- all of which make it a good candidate to be Earth Mark II. Phew, just in time! This one's almost worn out!
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NASA will clean up contaminated soil with salad dressing
There's an upside to the end of the space shuttle program: Now that the shuttle has been grounded, NASA can turn its attention to acres of contaminated soil and groundwater, the result of chemical spills from shuttle launches. And they're doing it in a novel way: with an oil-based emulsion that's made of corn and looks like dressing. The technique was first designed in scribbles on the back of a napkin, perhaps after eating a salad.
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New photovoltaic generator runs on heat instead of sunlight
Photovoltaic cells, the basic unit of solar power systems, turn light into electricity. But fueling photovoltaics with sunlight isn't always practical. MIT scientists came up with a way around this issue: they found a really efficient way to turn heat into light.
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The end of Borders and the importance of 'third places' in the city
The liquidation of Borders bookstores in cities raises the question of how to preserve the social value of spaces that are now prime real estate.
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Strip-mining the Moon: Bad idea, or the worst idea?
As a millennial, I don't share boomers' enthusiasm for the power of science to solve all problems. So when someone says that strip-mining the Moon for rocks rich in helium-3, heating the rocks to harvest the helium, and using that helium for nuclear fusion will solve the world's energy problems, I am inclined to say, “Ha! You power-mad old person, you are living in a science fiction story.” But that, in fact, may be the direction humanity is heading in, moon-wise.
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Beware the pollution-dumping space tube
It has a way of really hamstringing environmental activism. (Image via the always-hilarious Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.)
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Environmental regulations visible from space
We're learning a lot about space spiders and space bacteria from the nerd horde at the NASA tweetup, but somehow this one from Rachel Maddow writer Tricia McKinney is the most chilling. (She's citing astronaut Leland Melvin.) It's true:
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Climate change satellite goes out in blaze of ‘Glory’
Photo: NASANASA’s Glory satellite was supposed to measure both solar radiation and the Earth’s capacity to retain it in the course of global warming. Instead, it died trying. The satellite’s launch platform, a “Taurus XL” rocket that is every bit as janky as its namesake automobile (3 duds out of 9 launches, so far), failed […]