Comedy Central’s hilarious Drunk History—a show in which comedians get sloppy-drunk and share historical tales, which then are acted out by sober actors who earnestly lip-sync every slurred line of dialogue—kicked off its third season last night with a little special something for science geeks.
In an open letter to Congress today, ex-astronaut and current NASA head honcho Charles F. Bolden Jr. shared some choice words: Quit wasting money, and start sending US astronauts to space aboard US spacecraft.
Everybody’s talking about heading to Mars these days. But Buzz Aldrin, legendary figure from a space long past, might actually get to the job done.
Your regular commercial airliner, like a Boeing 747 is fast. A super-spy jet like the SR-71 Blackbird is much faster than that, traveling at over three times the speed of sound. So how does a deep-space probe like New Horizons, which recently flew past Pluto, compare? Thanks to this animation, you can see it’s very,…
November 30, 1982: A foggy morning before the inaugural flight of the Space Shuttle Challenger offered no hint to the troubles that would plague the mission. On top of an over two-month launch delay, a malfunction placed the shuttle in a too-low orbit for the first shuttle-based spacewalk and satellite deployment.
Now that we’re reaching the date depicted in Back to the Future, there’s inevitably a lot of good-hearted ribbing about how we want our damn hoverboards. Plus where’s our flying cars? And so on. But while a few pieces of the science-fictional future have yet to materialize, there are plenty of others that are already…
It was a historic moment in meteorology late last week, when three Category 4 storms were simultaneously spotted marching across the Pacific. As if that wasn’t ominous enough, a tropical depression has just added itself to the mix.
In the distant reaches of the Universe, exploding stars and supermassive black holes are bending the very fabric of spacetime. It’s hard to wrap our brains around such tremendous forces, but we may be able to quantify them, in the form of gravitational waves. A new European Space Agency mission marks humanity’s first…
This has been a year of haptics: From the widespread use of it in consumer electronics through the Apple Watch, to the boom in development of touchable interfaces. Soon, an astronaut aboard the ISS will attempt a major haptic experiment—by controlling a super-precise robot here on Earth using force feedback from…
When Arx Pax unveiled its “hoverboard” last year, we had a hunch that this was but the first demonstration of the company’s new magnetic field technology. Why was Arx Pax really messing around with magnets? For one, to build a tractor beam.
Before the end of her record-setting stint on the International Space Station, astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti took a number photos of each module of the ISS, which the European Space Agency has stitched together into an awesome interactive tour.
You know it when you see it: The smooth, soaring typeface with two uncrossed A’s. NASA’s so-called “worm” logo is a beloved symbol of space exploration even decades after it was retired. Now, thanks to two designers in New York City, you can relive the glory days of design and America’s space agency on your coffee…
Julia Turner pens a deliciously quotable ode to geology as part of Slate’s Classes You Should Take series. From the “dense poetry” of the technical vocabulary to how unravelling what shapes our planet can “feel like X-ray vision or a sixth sense,” you’ll finish convinced that geology is more than rocks for jocks.
It appears that the standard tools used to identify chaotic signatures might be missing lots of hidden chaos — especially in systems that seem like they’re not chaotic at all.
Life on Mars may sound glamorous, but in reality it’s going to mean a lot of time crammed in a small bubble with a few other humans. This could end very badly. So to practice, NASA has taken to sticking people in domes and keeping them isolated for months on end.
December 5, 1961. A man at the controls of a module gazes at the lunar surface from close up. Is this an astronaut, approaching the Moon nearly eight years before Apollo 11? Nope—it’s a pilot testing Project LOLA, a massive network of hand-painted mosaics and tracked cameras that trained astronauts for the moon…
Six hundred million light years away, a pair of black holes spiral furiously about one another at the brilliant core of a starburst galaxy.
In China, west and slightly south of Beijing, lies the Ordos Basin. It resembles a teenager’s messy room—one corner is flat and clear, and the other is a giant pile of debris. And when we say, “giant,” we mean “the size of a state”—nd it’s on the move.
The retreat of Arctic sea ice has been so dramatic over the last few years that atlases are being changed. Now it turns out Greenland’s ice sheets are also melting faster than we thought—not on the visible surface, but due to currents deep below the ocean.
How far does $171 million go in Silicon Valley? A group of more than 160 companies, schools, and government agencies are going to find out—thanks to a grant from the Department of Defense that will fund a San Jose institute devoted to developing flexible tech.
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