Curiosity Rover Lands on Mars →
I have nothing to add to this beyond what you’ve likely already read. Regardless, I friggin’ love space.
Are butterflies two animals in one? →
According to this theory, long, long ago, two very different animals, one destined to be wormy, the other destined to take wing, accidently mated, and somehow their genes learned to live side-by-side in their descendants. But their genes never really integrated.
Scientists attempting to look at center of the Milky Way →
A black hole should cast a shadow. The goal is to capture an image of that shadow.Three arrays is just a start. Doeleman and his cohort have been operating this same network of radio telescopes since 2007, when they pointed the array at the galactic center and detected “structure on the event-horizon scale,” a deeply obscured blip in space whose dimensions match the predicted size of Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A-star”), the four-million-solar-mass black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Video games indicate that it’s going to be Space Bugs.[1]
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Because—surprise!—it’s always Space Bugs. ↩
The battle to entomb our nuclear remains
Matt Stroud writing for The Verge:
“This is really the complexity of siting a waste site,” she said. “Scientists on site are in a predictive mode. And what makes it more difficult is that you’re trying to predict health risks tens of thousands of years from now based often on whether or not there might be a collective memory in the future that nuclear waste is buried in this spot.”
Nuclear waste, danger, important, whatever. It’s that last bit that I find fascinating—how do you make people in the future remember where a nuclear waste disposal site is located? And how do you warn them not to dig it up? A decade is easy enough. But a hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand?