Dang, That's Cool!

With an astonishing 12.5 MILLION kilometer radius, the ring is the biggest of its kind known in the solar system. Check out Scientific American’s discussion of the discovery by clicking this pretty little line!

As our technology develops, we see more and more. As we see more, our technology develops. As our technology develops, we see more and more. As we see more…

Neil

PS Leaf color changing post coming soon! Soon you will know the why and how of fall colors! Hooray!

Beautiful fall colors! But where do they come from, and why are they coating the ground?

Hello! I haven’t done one of these long posts in a little while, so I thought I would remedy that. If you’re one of those people who seem to be suddenly coming to visit this site in great numbers, welcome! I’m glad to have you. Anyway, let’s get on with it.

I wanted to discuss the changes going on all around for those of us living in temperate deciduous forests like the kind in the northeastern United States. Every year, billions and billions of trees shed their leaves to prepare for winter. The precursor to this amputation is the emergence of beautiful and vivid fall leaf color.  But what accounts for this color, and why do trees shed their leaves in the first place? In this exciting two-part series, we’ll answer both questions! First, why do some trees lose their leaves in the fall? Read the rest of this entry »

This spectacular image of a jet of gas and dust in the constellation Carina was just released by the Hubble team.

Is it Christmas already? Hubble has recovered from a May 2009 service mission and its attendant scientists have released new data and images. Go check it out on the Hubble website, here. Read the rest of this entry »

It's Mars!! Picture taken by the wonderful Hubble Space Telescope.

Wonderful new pictures of the Martian surface have been released! Taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that is currently orbiting Mars (really?), doing reconnaissance (no way!), the pictures total over a thousand in number and show a huge variety of geological features on the red planet.

You know, we live in an amazing time. We have a machine, orbiting another planet (also known as “that red speck you see in the sky at night sometimes,” to humans of earlier times), taking photographs of its surface and transmitting them through space back to the planet of its origins, where its makers decode its transmissions and turn them into images which they can stare at and point at all night long. We sent that machine there with a monstrously huge rocket engine, and we got it to go just exactly where we wanted it to, even though our planet is moving at 107,000 km/h around the sun and Mars is traveling 86,700 km/h. That’s not to mention the orbiter’s target is 55,000,000km away from Earth at its closest approach and an astounding 400,000,000km away at its furthest. Seriously. Everyone needs to appreciate the insane technological and scientific accomplishment that this represents. Humans are truly spectacular creatures, despite all our shortcomings.

Anyway, enough of me waxing poetic. Go look at those cool pictures of another planet!!

-Neil

In the fullness of geologic time, even the tallest mountains crumble to the sea.

This is the process of erosion, where rock is pulverized into sediment and transported far away from its original source.  Eventually the sediment gets deposited in a new location, buried, and then baked into new rock by the immense heat and pressure of the Earth’s interior.  This rock may then be uplifted and eroded again, continuing the geologic cycle that has been slowly and inexorably churning up the crust of this tiny dot we call a home ever since its birth four and a half billion years ago.

Read the rest of this entry »