Crater

The Festival is thrilled to have Homer Hickam, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Rocket Boys, as a Featured Author this year. Homer's new book Crater, the first novel in his new Helium-3 series for young adults, will be released just in time for the Festival. You have the opportunity to meet Homer at the Teen Book Fair Stage: Fiction on Sunday, April 29th at 10:55 AM with a free book signing after! Homer will also be a part of USA Science & Engineering Festival Book Fair Featured Author Panel Discussion entitled Science Stories in Society & School: Using Narrative to Bridge…
Those of you who know me know that I'm unhappy living here in Arizona. The landscape and ecosystem of the Sonoran Desert, while beautiful to many, is too dry, rocky, and devoid of life for me to enjoy living here. After my time here, I've decided that, were it somehow offered to me, I would probably pass on the opportunity to go to Mars. And so I present to you a little game I call "Mars or Arizona," where I will show you some pictures, and you get to guess which ones are pictures of Mars and which ones are pictures of Arizona. Sound easy? Well let's bring on the pictures, and see if you…
So in a recent column I told you all the problems with having water on Mars in recent history -- namely that the atmosphere is too thin to have supported it. But many of you have (rightly) pointed out to me that there is some evidence that there could have been water on Mars a very long time ago, and that would explain some of the major features on Mars. But one problem that remained is this: where are the carbonate deposits at the bottoms of these so called streambeds or dried-up lakes? Well, over the weekend I got an interesting email from National Geographic Magazine about Holden Crater on…