No. Not a post about Buzz Lightyear. A post about 2 Canadian 17 year olds who sent a Lego man to the edge of space. Using a $400 budget, Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad were able to design and construct a homemade helium powered module that included several digital cameras and a video camera. They [...]
Most of us are unsuspecting chemical addicts, and one family is helping to educate us. The Goode family are stars of the documentary Chemerical: Redefining Clean for a New Generation. For three months the Goodes were documented as they replaced all their cleaning products with the old-fashioned stuff: baking soda, vinegar, borax, and combinations of [...]
Is our Earth doomed by asteroid collisions? Remember the Hollywood action flicks Deep Impact and Armageddon? Space missions were launched to try and avoid catastrophic collisions with an asteroid. Will that be happening in real life? Scientists say it is probable. Eventually. When Apophis, a 270-metre wide asteroid, was first discovered in 2004, astronomers estimated [...]
Volcanoes are one of those parts of science that we all find fascinating; from a distance. Perhaps you are old enough, like Grandpa Richard, to remember the Mount St. Helen’s volcano erupting back in the 1980′s. A friend visited the area afterwards and brought me a jar of ash from the site. Unfortunately, I have [...]
An age old problem. How to choose a good marriage partner. One method involves mathematics. Suppose you decide to marry, and to select your life partner you will interview at most 100 candidate spouses. The interviews are arranged in random order, and you have no information about candidates you haven’t yet spoken to. After each [...]
Grandpa Richard cannot resist good science stories and photos. Over at Wired.com today is a post about evidence of times when asteroids have hit our Earth. Really neat photos accompany the text. Could it happen again? Have you seen the movies portraying such an event?
Interesting post on Slashdot explaining how the Earth’s period of habitability is coming to an end soon. Well, soon on a cosmological timescale. As they say on Stargate, we need to start considering an alpha site we can move some of us to.
