06 July 2015
From SETI to black crust on Churyumov-Gerasimenko: looking for alien life
... with alien life are regularly made by unstable individuals (who sometimes claim sex abuse – as parodied by the movie “Independence Day”), and, as such, have become another pop culture punch line: Yet many scientists believe...
27 July 2015
Debating Kepler 452b, Yuri Milner, and the search for intelligent life
... going. Hollywood, of course, will meanwhile keep us hoping that whatever we do find won’t be anything like a Ridley Scott movie (please?).
10 August 2015
ISS lettuce: first food grown in space eaten by Scott Kelly, Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui
... first time ever, we are growing fresh vegetables on the ISS. We have seen prototypes of “space gardens” in such movies as Danny Boyle’s “Sunshine,” but what was fiction has now become reality. The practice of growing vegetables...
24 August 2015
The science of space movies: Matt Damon, “The Martian,” and the great Mars gamble
Most dramatic films set in space aren’t too concerned with reality (nor do we ask them to be). Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” promises to be different. “The Martian” is based on a bestselling e-book by software engineer Andy Weir. Weir poured a ton of...
16 March 2016
Fog looms large on Titan
.... “We initially set out to see whether we could see clouds from the surface of Titan - clouds are seen in movies from the surface of mars, taken by the MSL rover curiosity - and instead we came across these features...
27 February 2017
Thirty years in the making - researchers show SN1987A in all of its glory
... anniversary of the most famous supernova to date – SN 1987A – researchers have been working hard to construct time-lapse movies and a three-dimensional model so that the public can ‘see’ a supernova explosion in as much detail as they possibly...
