Physics

If you made a wish on every star in the universe, you’d need to make about a trillion trillion wishes—that’s a 1 followed by 24 zeros. Of course, you can’t see all of those stars from your bedroom window. You can’t even see them all from the Hubble Space Telescope, and you won’t be able

Sugar. A variant on the sweetest ingredient in many a sumptuous holiday feast, glycolaldehyde has now been found in a star-forming region of space far from the galactic center called G31.41+0.31, about 26,00 light years away from Earth. Directly linked to the origin of life, glycolaldehyde is an advantageous find for researchers seeking out habitable

Wild Turkey / Image Credit: Andrea Westmoreland via Flickr There are 60-foot high balloons floating above packed city blocks, cranberries on the stove, inside-the-turkey stuffing, mashed potatoes, outside-the-turkey stuffing, football, abominably huge turkeys, and one lucky bird. The best part of Thanksgiving dinner? Leftover Thanksgiving dinner. But those leftovers take hard work– that hot, perfect,

Who hasn’t wished the doctor would prescribe a week of vacation or a trip to Walt Disney World to cure an ailment? For patients with kidney stones, that might be just around the corner. According to research published in 2016 in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, a trip to your local amusement park might

By: Hannah Pell Two years ago on November 16th, 2018, representatives from more than 60 member nations of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (International Bureau of Weights and Measures) convened in Versailles, France to make a very important decision. Representatives in attendance to the 26th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) unanimously

Just outside the town of Oracle, Arizona, nestled between the seemingly endless plains of the Sonaran desert and the cactus-pocked foothills of Mount Lemmon, stands an enormous glass ziggurat: Biosphere 2. Built in the late ‘80s at the behest of an oil tycoon, the structure was intended to be a small-scale model of a self-contained

Artistic representation of OSIRIS-REx over the asteroid Bennu. NASA/GODDARD/University of Arizona. In 2016, the OSIRIS-REx probe left Earth but unlike most other probes on their journey out to space, OSIRIS-REx does intend to return home. If all goes well, OSIRIS-REx will return to its home in 2023 carrying a precious sample. As of 2018, OSIRIS-REx

By: Hannah Pell It’s nationwide election time yet again. As of October 30th, more than 85 million Americans have already cast their ballot, a remarkable number considering total voter turnout for the 2016 election was 138 million. By the time you’re reading this, we may or may not yet know the winners, especially given the

By Allison Kubo Hutchsion  Although humans first witnessed nuclear reactors in 1942 with the development of the Chicago-Pile by Enrico Fermi, natural fission reactors existed billions of years ago. Fission is the process of breaking apart atoms of heavy elements such as uranium. Energy is released during fission in the form of heat and can

NASA image of a dust storm from 1998. Provided by the SeaWiFS Project, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, and ORBIMAGE – NASA Visible Earth, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=402743 By Jeremiah O’Mahony The Canary Islands spent a few days of March 2018 shrouded in Saharan dust. Calimas, two-to three-day-long gusts of sand and warm wind named for the haze they

By: Hannah Pell On September 22, 2020, NASA and the U. S. Space Command announced that they were tracking an unidentified piece of space debris that appeared to be hurtling toward the International Space Station (ISS). It was predicted to pass by within only a few kilometers, dangerously too close to chance, at 5:21 p.m.

By: Hannah Pell On 23 January 2020, the Doomsday Clock was calibrated to 100 seconds before midnight — the closest it has even been — by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the organization in charge of the clock. Because the Doomsday Clock is set no sooner than annually, this decision was made even before

Originally written for https://www.tamiawilliams.com/blog  - TamiaWilliams  Image: 5 Year Old Drip (Bobo hair ties, Clear skin & Sunday’s best), 2001  This is my mom’s favorite picture of me as a child. On the back, it’s dated Oct/Nov 2001 – Tamia – 5yrs old. I have no recollection of this day, when the picture was taken

 What makes skin so tough? Originally published: May 4 2015 – 11:45am, Inside Science News Service By: Lisa Marie Potter, Contributor (Inside Science) — Skin has to be flexible enough to jump, crawl, and kick with us. It also has to be resilient enough to withstand our falls, scrapes, and cuts. Scientists have marveled at skin’s strength for

By Allison Kubo Hutchison  Comparison of Earth, the Moon, and Ceres. Image by Gregory Revera NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA. Ceres is the largest body in the asteroid belt. It represents the history of our solar system as a protoplanet, a planetary embryo which formed 4.56 billion years ago. Earth itself is made of the agglomeration of several planetary

By: Hannah Pell On September 20th, 2019 — one year ago today as I write this — the infamous Three Mile Island (TMI) nuclear power plant was permanently shut down. TMI Unit-2 has been shuttered since the partial meltdown in 1979, an event described as the “most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant

 According to folklore, earwigs like to crawl through the ears of sleeping humans, burrow into their brains, and lay eggs. Perhaps for this reason, or maybe because of their large rear-end pinchers, these insects tend to fall in the “creepy” category. Don’t be fooled through, earwigs are more sophisticated than they look: they’re record-holders in

At sports venues designed to maximize crowd atmosphere, beware of hearing loss. Originally published: Apr 14 2014 – 2:45pm, Inside Science News Service By: Brian Owens, ISNS Contributor (ISNS) — The roar of the crowd is a major part of the excitement of attending a sporting event. A noisy, engaged crowd makes for a better experience for fans,

Public engagement event at a local high school with the Women and Minorities in the Physical Sciences group in graduate school By: Brean Prefontaine   We all know what is about to happen when someone asks, “What do/did you study?” As soon as you utter the word “physics” you have to brace for the inevitable “oh,

By: Hannah Pell “Assume the cow is a perfect sphere.”  Any of us who have taken a physics class or two has probably met the Spherical Cow at some point (or a version of it). How can I calculate the volume of an irregular, misshapen 3-D object like a cow? Well, I’ll smooth out the