I used to fly quite a bit – for a decade I flew at least 50,000 miles a year, and was at more than 75,000 for nearly half that time. Every time I fly this means that cosmic rays are falling on me like rain, and continue to do so until we land. In fact, [...]
Space may be the final frontier, but it’s likely to be the next battleground. At least that was the conclusion I drew from a distinguished panel that spoke to the Fletcher Club of New York a few days ago (May 9). The evening’s topic, the weaponization of space, seemed reasonably innocuous – I’d expected to [...]
Over the weekend Earth was slammed by the biggest solar storm in about a decade. Days earlier a huge x-class solar flare (the most powerful category) had blasted millions of tons of hydrogen into space, with Earth in the cross-hairs. The eruption – called a coronal mass ejection – blasted through space at more than [...]
A few months ago the Center for European Nuclear Research (which goes by the acronym CERN) reported it had found evidence of the most-wanted subatomic particle – the Higgs Boson (aka the God particle). If this finding is confirmed it will wrap up one of the longest-standing loose ends in our current model (the Standard [...]
By Dr. Y The last years have seen an increasing number of observations showing that Mars once had liquid water and that it has ice not far underground today. In the 36 years since the equivocal results of the Viking probes’ search for life space scientists have scaled back their experiments, looking instead for evidence [...]