The Last Space Shuttle Flight: an End of an Era

Last Friday, as I write this, the space shuttle Atlantis had returned from its final mission, the final mission of the Space Shuttles. This brings to a close the Shuttle era of US spaceflight, an era which has been most disappointing. The idea of the Shuttle was a legitimate one, to try to reuse as [...]

Dawn spacecraft now orbiting asteroid Vesta

On July 16, the Dawn spacecraft went into orbit around the asteroid Vesta, the first spacecraft ever to go into orbit around an asteroid. Dawn has returned pictures like NASA – All Eyes on Vesta. It has a typical asteroid appearance, cratered and lumpy, though it is more spherical than the smaller asteroids. It also [...]

Happy Discovery Birthday, Neptune!

It’s the first anniversary of the discovery of Neptune. The first Neptune-year anniversary; one Neptune year is about 164.79 Earth years. This planet was discovered as a result of some astronomers discovering that planet Uranus’s observed positions did not quite match its calculated ones. Urbain Leverrier and John Couch Adams decided that there was an [...]

LHC reaches its data-production target for 2011

The Large Hadron Collider has reached its data-production target for 2011, 1 inverse femtobarn of proton-proton collisions, or 70 trillion of them. It has performed so well that it will likely make 4 more inverse femtobarns before the end of this year. This will be enough to see the more distinctive decay signatures of various [...]

Keith Porteus Wood at the UN today

Wood is addressing the United Nations Human Rights Council, speaking on behalf of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) about child abuse in the Catholic Church.