Tag Archives: space

Why Older Planets Are More Likely to Harbor Life

To date, the Kepler space telescope has found more than 1,200 likely planets orbiting stars beyond the sun — quite a haul for a satellite that’s been flying for just over two years. The true prize Kepler is hunting for, of course, is not just any planet, but one that’s a twin of Earth — about the size of our world, orbiting in a zone where the temperature range is like ours

New Particle Detector Is Poised to Solve Cosmic Mysteries

For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA’s claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: “During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails “?

WTF: Bangkok’s Hip New Gallery Space

Bangkok’s hottest hangout was actually born from “six months of despair and depression.” After completing a course of curatorial studies and unable to renew her Rockefeller Foundation research funds, Somrak Sila wondered what she could do to “bring art closer to Thai people.” Knowing that “another commercial gallery wasn’t the answer,” Somrak, 32, and three partners created WTF, tel: 662 6246. It’s a hipster-filled, three-story bar, caf, exhibition space and screening room — with a dance floor

NASA’s Next Mission: Mars, Titan or Comet?

You can think of NASA’s Discovery program as a sort of outer-space American Idol: every few years the agency invites scientists to propose unmanned planetary missions. The projects have to address some sort of fundamental science question, and they have to be relatively cheap to pull off — say, half a billion dollars or so

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Is Approaching Asteroid Vesta

Schoolchildren by the thousands wept when Pluto was officially banished from the ranks of the major planets back in 2006, but for the asteroids, demotion to the interplanetary minor leagues is very old news. When Ceres was discovered in 1801 during a search of the mysteriously empty space between Mars and Jupiter, astronomers were convinced they’d found a new planet.