The Hubble space telescope recently photographed a beautiful planetary nebula. The European Space Agency have taken this, and a series of other images from Hubble, and produced a wonderful video. You begin with a view of the night sky pretty much as seen from Earth, then zoom in on the tiny patch of sky where […]
The Animations Page on the website of the Minor Planet Centre holds several animations of our solar system. Including one that shows the Earth’s orbit during 2002, along with all the Near Earth Objects that passed within 20 million kilometres of our home during that period. Some pass very close indeed. Some of the objects […]
The planet Saturn, has many moons. One of these moons is called Iapetus, and is a little odd.
For one thing, most of Saturn’s moons orbit around the plane of Saturn’s own orbit about the sun. The orbit of Iaptus doesn’t. In fact it is tilted by about 15 degrees. This is unusual. It is also […]
I was quite excited to see a story on the BBC about the discovery of some 700,000 year old flint tools on a site in Britain. I thought, wow, we’ve been on this beautiful island for at least 700,000 years!
Then I realised that, whilst neothilic man was skinning a water vole down in Suffolk, the […]
I see that the Guardian is also now reporting about an asteroid that might actually hit the Earth in 2036. There is currently thought to be a 1 in 5500 chance of it hitting. The asteroid is by no means big enough to cause any mass extinctions, however it is big enough for things to […]
There is an article in Phytochemistry (an actual proper serious scientific journal), which pretty much shows that beer prevents cancer. So, ner.
I hope you will excuse me while I partake of some of my special cancer prevention therapy.
For my sins, I watched the “National Lottery Jet Set” gameshow on TV at the weekend. It was rubbish, but I was particulary annoyed by one question:
Eamonn Holmes: And the category is Science. Do you want to play or pass?
Contestant: Er … I’ll play.
Eamonn Holmes: In astrology, what sign of the zodiac…
Grr.
This is a post about perspective. Perspective is something that it is important to maintain. You may find that reading the popular press on a regular basis can undermine your sense of perspective. However, here is a little list that may help:
There have been 61 deaths worldwide from the H5N1 strain of Avian Flu over […]
Is this not the sweetest photograph you have ever seen? Go and take a look.
The photograph came second place in the “people” category of the 2005 Visions of Science photographic awards.
You might have heard, in the news, about a recent study that found an association between childhood leukaemia and the proximity of a child’s home at birth to high voltage power lines. From having observed media misreporting of science stories over the years, I usually take such reports with a pinch of salt.
So I sought […]