The Solar System
milhayser | October 20, 2014"Death is the only wise adviser that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet'." -Carlos Castaneda
"When a man starts to learn, he is never clear about his objectives. His purpose is faulty; his intent is vague. He hopes for rewards that will never materialize for he knows nothing of the hardships of learning. And his thoughts soon clash.…
milhayser | December 7, 2012Although Curiosity has not found evidence of life on Mars, NASA announced yesterday that its suite of dirt analyzers works perfectly. Meanwhile new discoveries on Earth and the planet Mercury continue to imply the possibility of extraterrestrial life. On ERV, Abbie Smith marvels at the extremophile bacteria that have been locked under an Antarctic ice sheet for the last 2800 years, "happily (but slowly!) generating proteins in their hypersaline, super cold, no oxygen, ton of iron environment!" And though Smith would love to work in Antarctica, she says it "might be more fun to go to Europa…
milhayser | May 21, 2011
On Built on Facts, Matt Springer writes that "there's really no such thing as a purely continuous monochromatic light wave" and "any pulse of light that lasts a finite amount of time will actually contain a range of frequencies." Pass this pulse of light through a medium such as glass, which "can have a different refractive index for each frequency," and some very weird things start to happen. On Life at the SETI Institute, Dr. Lori Fenton explains her study of "aeolian geomorphology - how wind shapes a planetary surface." As it does on Earth, weather makes wave patterns in the dunes of…