Satellites show Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than scientists realized

A new study based on NASA and ESA satellite data shows that Arctic sea ice is thinning at a “frightening rate.” Measuring the ice via satellites each month from 2018 to 2021, polar scientists Sahra Kacimi of the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Ron Kwok of the University of Washington’s Applied Physics … Read more

Namesake of NASA’s sun-touching spacecraft dies at age 94

Eugene Parker, the pioneering astrophysicist whose name graces NASA’s Parker Solar Probe mission, died Tuesday (March 15) at age 94. Parker’s work focused on understanding the sun. In a key contribution to the field, he proposed that the sun produces a phenomenon called solar wind, a steady stream of charged particles that flows off the … Read more

James Webb Space Telescope spotted by Europe’s Gaia spacecraft 1 million miles from Earth (photo)

A star-charting spacecraft spotted NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope while both were working in deep space. The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and the James Webb Space Telescope both orbit around Earth-sun Lagrange point 2, or L2, a gravitationally stable point between the sun and Earth that is roughly 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth. … Read more

Io: A guide to Jupiter’s volcanic moon

Io — Jupiter’s fifth moon — is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. Io’s surface is peppered with hundreds of volcanoes, some spewing sulfurous plumes hundreds of miles high.  The volcanic moon is Jupiter’s third-largest and the innermost Galilean satellite, it finds itself caught in a gravitational tug-of-war between Jupiter and two … Read more

Gun Violence Is an Epidemic; Health Systems Must Step Up

The rate of gun violence continues to rise across America. There was nearly a 30 percent increase in homicides between 2019 and 2020, making it the largest one-year increase in six decades. The number of gun deaths in 2021 climbed even higher and is approaching the previous peaks in gun death rates in the early … Read more

Nikon Z5 review | Space

The Nikon Z5 is a compact, entry-level mirrorless camera that’s designed to be lightweight and easy on the wallet. The cheapest mirrorless that Nikon currently make, the Z5 aims to be a jack-of-all-trades armed with 24.3 megapixel stills capture and 4K UHD 30 frames per second video recording and is fitted with a Z-mount for … Read more

‘Simple Relativities (Your Imagination)’: Why I made this Albert Einstein homage music video

So, why in the name of the cosmos am I LARP-ing Albert Einstein as a 1950s-stye doo-wop group?!  Well, I wanted to make you smile in these very tense times.  The spark:  It began as a COVID-19 fever hallucination. I had the bug for seven weeks, back in the pre-vaccine days. Lying medicated on the … Read more

Hubble Space Telescope spots eerie galaxy ‘eye’ staring across the universe

A new Hubble Space Telescope clearly captures the heart of a distant galaxy structured much like our own. The new image shows the “eye” of a galaxy called NGC 1097, which is located 48 million light-years away from Earth. NGC 1097 is a barred spiral galaxy, which puts it in the same category as the … Read more