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the weapon no one can see coming…
When XKCD managed to outdo itself yet again with an article about what would happen if you tried to play a very simple game of baseball at relativistic velocities, I remembered about an interesting...
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to boldly go where we can’t go. yet…
After screaming through the Martian atmosphere and pulling off a ridiculously complicated and risky set of maneuvers, Curiosity is finally on the surface of the Red Planet. Aside from the sheer fact...
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what’s holding back modern science and technology
In the interest of full disclosure and not to pull a Lehrer on you, you should know that today’s posts was originally a comment I left on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog prompted by a discussion about...
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so just how intelligent can we make our space probes, revisited
Once upon a time I wrote a post about the sacrifices in intelligence our rovers have to make to be able to travel to other worlds and why these sacrifices are necessary. Basically, we can build very...
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an open letter to those who think curiosity was a waste
Stop me if you’ve heard this before. Why is NASA spending $2.5 billion to land a rover on Mars when there are poor people still starving on Earth and the national debt has to be paid down? I’ve posted...
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one giant loss for mankind…
Unless you lived in total media isolation for the last few days, you know that the first man to ever set foot on another world, has died. We truly lost a real hero, a man who found himself leading a...
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why politicians make bad mission planners
If you allow me the indulgence, I’d like to once again take an article about something not exactly all that relevant to science and technology, and go off on an important tangent. In this case, the...
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no, cosmic rays aren’t to blame for climate change
According to astrophysicist Charles Wang, supernovas belching out cosmic rays are clouding our skies and warming the planet. Certainly, dumping greenhouses gases into the atmosphere isn’t exactly...
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just how habitable is gliese 163c?
According to results from Kepler, there’s another habitable planet just 49 light years away. Well, mostly habitable by something. Gliese 163c is on the higher end of the super-earth label, coming in...
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the amazing, possibly viable warp drive
Well ladies and germs, it appears that when I tried to calculate how much effort it would take for an alien civilization to create a warp drive, I may have been wrong and so were the theoreticians on...
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can you really fall into a black hole? or, fun with time dilation.
As we discussed many times on Weird Things, black holes are the most amazing and terrifying things in the universe we know, and they’re not shy about gathering every law of physics we’re sure we...
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is this the real life, is this just a complex cosmological simulation?
Welcome back to yet another installment of the question of whether we’re all just products of an advanced simulation that created an entire universe, but this time, instead of plunging deep into the...
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so what does alpha centauri’s planet mean for space exploration?
After decades of trying to find out whether our closest stellar neighbors have planets we could one day explore, we finally have a confirmation that there appears to be an Earth-sized planet floating...
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the strange tales of phantom soviet cosmonauts
Apparently the start of the Cold War must’ve been really easy on intelligence agencies since it seemed that whatever strange rumor surfaced, these agencies bought it hook line and sinker, if you...
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discarding panspermia with insufficient evidence
One of the topics that’s been prominently featured on Weird Things has been panspermia, the hypothesis that life can originate somewhere in the galaxy and spread though asteroid or comet impacts, or...
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how to keep exploring space semi-vicariously
One of the recent ideas in space exploration tries to avoid landing astronauts on other worlds, risking exposure to dangerous radiation and alien weather. Instead, the plan would be to build a...
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the awfully lazy wonders of the nerd rapture
The mindset of a Singularitarian is an interesting one. It’s certainly very optimistic, countering a lot of criticisms of their ideas by declaring that surely, someone will solve them with the mighty...
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can spacex really build a martian metropolis?
Whatever you do, don’t say that Elon Musk isn’t ambitious. While most Silicon Valley bigwigs try to sell us on some new app they always promise will change the world as we know it and larding their...
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and now for something surprisingly simpler
Usually a new discovery in deep space tends to further complicate our picture of the universe, almost as if the cosmos says "oh yeah, you think you have a good idea of how this works?" and throws a...
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what alcohol can tell us about the fate of the universe
Once upon a time, we looked at an explanation for dark matter involving a theory about how all matter around us could decay over 6.6 × 10^33 years and noted that there’s a controversy as to whether...
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