Tag Archives: moon

Astronomy, Climatology and Meteorology, Electromagnetism, Engineering, Geoscience, History, Imaging, Physics, Science, Space, Technology, Top 10

The Other Grand Tour: 10 Stunning Space Stopovers

Leave a comment
Fomalhaut b
Image courtesy NASA/ESA.

Cosmos is back, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is tooling around the universe in Carl Sagan’s Ship of the Imagination. But suppose someone handed you the proverbial keys? Where in space and/or time would you go?

If you don’t have a ready answer, never fear. I’ve put together an itinerary that can’t fail, whether your tastes run to science or sightseeing. Sure, we might have to break a few physical laws and grow a few extra senses along the way but, hey, it’s not called the Ship of Literal Reality, is it? So hang your fuzzy planets from the rearview and strap in for a star-spanning tour, a jaunt from the local neighborhood to the unreachably distant (and disproportionately dangerous) corners of the universe, en route to…

10 Space Landmarks We’d Like to Visit

Auto, Biochemistry, Computing, Consumer, Engineering, Gadgets, Genetics, Green, Health, History, Imaging, Internet, Materials, Medicine, Neuroscience, Physics, Science, Space, Technology, Top 10

The Future: At the Corner of Close and Soon

Leave a comment
Aerocar 600 fantasy flying car
Not quite what we had in mind.
(Photo by Joe Mabel)

Somehow the future we get is never quite the one we were promised. Then again, sometimes the very ideas wrapped in the pages of sci-fi and Popular Science are right under our noses, in disguise. After all, we have hand-held sensor-communicators and miraculous supermaterials – they just take the rather mundane form of carbon-fiber-wrapped smartphones.

Maybe our blindness arises from our physical and electronic architecture. Has exchanging Googie buildings for Google caused us to overlook the flying-car equivalents that fill our everyday lives, or soon will? Read on.

Our 10 Favorite Replacements for ‘Where’s My Flying Car?’

Astronomy, Computing, Consumer, Electromagnetism, Engineering, Health, Imaging, Internet, Physics, Science, Space, Technology

Laser Communications Gets a Zap(pa) from Moon Unit

Leave a comment
Photo by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky. Unrelated to the NASA experiment but cool nonetheless.

Lasers rank among the most vital and widespread technologies in the industrialized world, but for years they were considered a solution looking for a problem. One possible application lay in communications: Lasers, being of higher frequency and energy than radio, held the potential to communicate more information per second.

Fast-forward to October 2013, when NASA pulled off one of the most impressive proofs-of-concept in history. That month, a spacecraft orbiting the moon sent data 239,000 miles to Earth via a pulsed laser beam at a download rate of 622 megabits per second (by comparison, high-speed consumer data plans are usually measured in the tens of megabits). Everyone from cryptographers to high-speed Wall Street traders sat up and took notice. Sound cool? Read on as I explain…

How Laser Communication Works

History, Imaging, Science, Space, Technology, Travel

Spotting ancient walls at 17,000 MPH

Leave a comment
Great Wall of China
Photo by Tianxiaozhang.

“You know, you can see it for miles – goes on for miles, over the hills and everything. But, so does the M6. Do you know what I mean? You can see that for miles. And you go, ‘Great. And that does a job. You can drive on that.’” Thus did an unimpressed Karl Pilkington of An Idiot Abroad describe the Great Wall of China, allegedly the only manmade object visible from space.

Which raises and interesting question: Why can’t you see the British M6 motorway from space? Or can you? For that matter, can you actually see the Great Wall?

Great Wall of China: Only Manmade Object Visible from Space?

Astronomy, Engineering, Film, Geoscience, History, Physics, Science, Travel

The moon, in the conservatory, with an iceberg

Leave a comment
Image (and model) by Werner Willmann.

The 100th anniversary of Titanic’s fateful voyage arrives laden with new photos, new articles and, of course, new theories regarding what caused her sundering. Over the past century, researchers, authors and filmmakers have blamed the incident on everyone from White Star management and Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard to Captain E. J. Smith and helmsman Robert Hitchins.

In this article, I examine the latest and arguably most novel theory: The moon did it.

Did the Moon Doom the Titanic?