What is the Best Dinosaur?

This is the funniest, most well-informed rant about dinosaurs I have ever witnessed (warning, NSFW language). I was a dinosaur freak as a kid, and I still remember a ridiculous amount about them. Can I just say how much I loved watching him shoot down people who thought plesiosaurs and pterodactlys were dinosaurs? Everything he [...]

Carnival of Space #159

Hey, check it out! It’s the Carnival of Space over at Next Big Future! This week’s coolest article, which I somehow missed before this: the Kepler science team has found 750 possible exoplanets!

Hoyt and Ruth

Normally I stick to topics that are at least tangentially related to science on this blog, but I’m making an exception. My grandfather, who is 92 this year, has entered the story of how he met my grandmother into an online writing contest. They were happily married for 68 years, and their story is truly [...]

Space-Based Solar Power: a solution to our burning need for energy

People burn things. This crude way to get energy has done wonders for us as a species, but I think it’s about time we moved on. It’s easy to forget how important burning stuff is in modern times because the burning is mostly hidden. Most of our electricity comes from burning coal and gas, but [...]

Carl Sagan’s Apple Pie Recipe

Tip of the Chef’s hat to Jason Dunn at The Space Tourist for posting this!

Solar System Tour: Mars

Continuing my re-posting of the solar-system tour that I made back in 2005 with a couple of other astronomy undergrads, here’s Mars! The target audience for this tour was younger than that for this blog, so you’ll have to forgive the simplistic tone… Mars (the Roman god of War, also known as Ares in Greek) [...]

The Biological Singularity

If you’re a sci-fi reader, you are probably familiar with the idea of the “technological singularity“. For the uninitiated, the Singularity is the idea that computational power is increasing so rapidly that soon there will be genuine artificial intelligence that will far surpass humans. Essentially, once you have smarter-than-human computers, they will drive their own [...]

Speaking to the Past with Book Covers

A friend of mine just shared this on Google reader. Douglas Coupland has come up with a clever idea: create Penguin book covers to explain the world as it is in 2010 to readers in 1935 when Penguin first started. Some of the coverse are really amusing, and several of them are space-related. Here are [...]

Review: Denialism

Do vaccines cause autism? Are genetically modified crops safe to eat? Is organic farming better than conventional? Is race a scientifically valid concept? What is the future of biotechnology now that a synthetic cell has been created? If you’ve ever asked those questions, then you should check out Denialism, by Michael Specter. If you think [...]

3QD Finalist!

It looks like my MSL: Mars Action Hero post is a finalist in the 3 Quarks Daily science blogging contest. The winners will be chosen by none other than Richard Dawkins. I am incredibly honored to be among the finalists, and it’s a real thrill to know that sometime in the next week or so, [...]