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to boldly come where none have come before?
PornHub has a grand vision, a vision of a man and a woman having sex on camera just as they reach the edge of space and feel the grasp of our planet’s gravity loosen for half an hour. It’s a vision...
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hey, what’s a world like you doing in a solar system like this?
According to some people, Pluto never stopped being a planet. While there was acrimony when the new definition was approved by the IAU, after a while it seemed that people got used to the idea that...
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how to doomsday prep like a planetary scientist
Unlike you see in the movies, no one will be rushing to save the Earth at the last minute with no budgetary or logistical constraints when we detect a killer asteroid headed towards us. Instead, there...
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if an astronaut falls into a black hole, will he turn into quantum fuzz?
Falling into a black hole is a confusing and complicated business, rife with paradoxes and weird quantum effects to reconcile. About a month ago, we looked at black holes’ interactions with the...
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no, we did not find aliens on a comet’s surface
If you don’t remember Chandra Wickramasinghe, here’s a quick refresher. Back in the day, the scientist worked with Fred Hoyle, the brilliant astronomer whose really poorly supported notions about the...
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what our trip to pluto can teach us about ourselves
After finally getting a close look at Pluto and putting many decades of speculation to rest, there are three important things to keep in mind. First is that humans have now seen every world we once...
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crank magnetism, spotted in the wild by newsweek
All right, look Newsweek, I get it. You need a catchy title for a throwaway article, ideally one you can tie into recent events bubbling up on search engines to get those sweet, sweet hits. And it’s...
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how not to shift the theological goalposts for hypothetical aliens
While the news keep calling Kepler-452b another Earth before somewhere in the depth of most breathless articles noting that all we know about it is that it’s rocky, similar in size to us, and it’s...
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how the cosmic web’s fingers can shape galaxies
We all know that our vast universe is lousy with galaxies. Trillions of trillions of the things sprawl across the known cosmos and more than likely, the unknown one as well. We know a lot about them,...
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we pledge allegiance to the independent martian federation?
Astrobiologist Jacob Haqq-Misra likes to ask questions about our future in space. If you’ve been following this blog for a long time and the name seems familiar, it’s because you’ve read a take on a...
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why you can’t nuke your way to a second earth
Mars has been calling humans for centuries and with every year we seem more eager to come and set up the groundwork for a lasting presence, so much so, there’s someone very seriously thinking about...
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why we’re one step closer to finding alien life
We’ve known for a while that Saturn’s moon Enceladus should have a huge ocean under all the thick surface ice thanks to the plumes of water it regularly ejects into space. These jets couldn’t have...
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why asteroid mining could restart the cold war
Despite several startups eager to set out into deep space and mine asteroids just like in a sci-fi movie but with fewer people and more robots, the sad fact is that extracting resources from the...
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say, how much would you want for that planet?
For just a moment, let’s pretend that we solve the controversial legal issues that surround how and if we’ll mine asteroids in the near future, and have managed to expand our way into space faring...
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why a briny mars is exciting, but isn’t necessarily good news
NASA’s recent big announcement, leaked before it was publicly made, is really quite interesting and offers the strongest evidence yet that Mars does have liquid water that might host life. Odd gullies...
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under the hazy blue skies of… pluto?
From the “space is amazing” files comes the new revelation that skies on Pluto aren’t dull gray, or almost transparent white, as drawn in so many hypothetical illustrations we’ve seen over the years,...
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when the answer could actually be aliens
Imagine a relatively ordinary white star much like our own, because despite appearing yellow in our skies, it’s actually bright white. Now, increase its size by half and add a pattern of dimming when...
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how scientists accidentally solved the universe’s weight problem
No one seems to be exempt from having some sort of an issue with weight nowadays, even all the matter in the universe. You see, by measuring the gravitational pull of all the galaxies, we’re able to...
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when too much skepticism about space exploration can be a bad thing
Hotel owner and space tourism pioneer Robert Bigelow has a pretty fervent belief that alien life is out there, that it’s intelligent, and that it may be visiting Earth. While most people would make...
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when you just can’t solve a problem with a giant laser canon
Whenever you see interstellar ships in fiction, they’re almost always immense, something close to the size of an aircraft carrier. There are a lot of good reasons for that. Traveling between the stars...
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