Robbie Gonzalez

Watch Today’s Historic Launch To The ISS, Live Right Now!

Today at 12:42 p.m. PDT/3:42 p.m. EDT, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is scheduled to begin his year-long journey to the International Space Station — a voyage which, if successful, will surpass the U.S. record for longest-duration human spaceflight by more than 100 days. Above: Scott Kelly sits inside a Soyuz simulator at the Gagarin Cosmonaut…

How To Fly A Spaceship To The ISS: Orbital Mechanics And A Fancy Stick

How do astronauts get from Earth to the International Space Station? Well, in a Soyuz spacecraft, of course. But do you know what kind of path the Soyuz takes to rendezvous with humanity’s orbital outpost? It’s probably not what you think. On Friday, NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly will launch on a Soyuz spacecraft destined for…

Wondering What To Expect After A Medical Abortion? Read This.

The latest installment of Oh Joy, Sex Toy offers an accessible, informative, and non-judgmental overview of medical abortion, one of several choices available to newly pregnant persons. The comic is well worth reading in its entirety. It links to a number of resources and medical studies, and deals with everything from basic anatomy to abortion…

Japanese researchers claim they can use worms to detect cancer in human urine. “In existing tests, people must have different examinations according to the type of cancer they have,” research leader Takaaki Hirotsu toldNew Scientist “Our odor-based test detected all nine types of cancer we tested.” Contact the author at [email protected].

Last Week’s Total Solar Eclipse – As Seen From 35,000 Feet

For last week’s solar eclipse, astronomer Glenn Schneider chartered a plane to fly through the vast shroud of darkness temporarily cast by the the moon’s shadow on the north Atlantic. Astrophotographer Stephan Heinsius was aboard the flight, with a video camera. Here’s what he and the other passengers saw. Also aboard the flight was Geoff…

This Is The Funniest Fake Dinosaur Documentary You’ll Watch Today

This is “Dinosaurs: Terrible Lizards,” a hilarious animated mockumentary by the folks at Rathergood that depicts dinosaurs – which literally means “terrible lizard” – as literally terrible, useless, sucky lizards. Notwithstanding its obvious factual, chronological, and anatomical errors (which, yes, we understand are not the point), the short is pretty excellent. Watch: [Rathergood via Laughing…

This Seed Plants Itself By Corkscrewing Into The Earth

Drill, baby, drill. The seeds of Erodium cicutarium – a plant better known as “the stork’s bill” or “filaree” – are remarkably dynamic. For starters, they are carried from their parent plants not by wind, water, or animals (all common forms of seed distribution), but via an explosive mechanism called “ballistic dispersal.” Seeds from the…

How to tell if he’s into you (if you’re an angler fish): “When he bites into you he’ll quickly become attached. Yes, at first he may seem a bit clingy, but as your bloodstreams merge, he’ll gradually begin to degenerate!” More practical dating advice from the animal kingdom, at The Hairpin. Contact the author at…

There Are Untold Sums Of Money Hiding In Your Poop

America’s collective human waste contains millions of dollars worth of energy, water, and even rare and valuable metals like gold and palladium. The question is: How do we extract it? Image Credit: Heather Lowers, USGS Denver Microbeam Laboratory At Popular Science, Mary Beth Griggs reports on the work of USGS researcher Kathleen Smith, which she…

Researchers Have Uncovered The Secrets Of The Velvet Worm’s Slime Jets!

The velvet worm hunts by bombarding its prey with a double barreled burst of slime. Now, scientists have figured out how these ooze-cannons work. GIF via NatGeoWild. Researchers led by Andrés Concha, of Adolfo Ibañez University in Santiago, used high speed video to determine that the velvet worm’s flailing slime cannons move too quickly to…

This Week’s Puzzle Is Impossible. Can You Explain Why?

The solution to this classic puzzle is that it’s impossible to solve. But can you explain why it’s impossible? Sunday Puzzle #25: Solving The Unsolvable Puzzle This classic puzzle goes by many names, but the challenge it poses is always some variation of the following: Without lifting your pen from the page, draw one continuous…

Where Are All The Close-Up Photos Of Ceres?

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft arrived in orbit around Ceres on March 6th – so why haven’t we seen any close-up photos of the dwarf planet? Above: Ceres, as photographed by Dawn on March 1 from a distance of 30,000 miles (About 48,000 km) | Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA If you’re the kind of person who puts stock…

Where Did Kissing Come From?

Kissing is so commonplace that most people rarely think to stop and ask where humans picked up the habit in the first place. Where in humanity’s evolutionary history did smooshing our faces together come to be regarded as a display of lust, care, friendship, and love? Photo Credit: Tuncay via flickr | CC BY 2.0…

How To Watch Friday’s Total Solar Eclipse

Do you live inside the swath of red depicted in this map? If so, you’re one of the few people on Earth able to directly witness Friday’s total solar eclipse. For everyone else, your best bet is to watch online. Head over to Slooh.com to watch live, beginning at 1:30 AM PDT/4:30 AM EDT/8:30 UTC.…

Coming Soon: Beer Brewed With Space Yeast

Beginning April 13, you’ll have a chance to try Ninkasi Brewing Company’s “Ground Control,” an imperial stout brewed with yeast that, last year, traveled to space. Here are the details, via Eugene Oregon based Ninkasi Brewing Co.: In 2014, the brewery’s co-founders embarked on a new kind of mission – the Ninkasi Space Program (NSP),…

DARPA Wants To Solve Ebola With DNA, Money, And Institutional Knowhow

Colonel Dan Wattendorf is a program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office. His goal: To dramatically suppress Ebola, and infectious diseases like it, with a new, unconventional vaccine. And according to Wattendorf, the biggest hurdles he faces in accomplishing this mission “aren’t scientific, but institutional.” Above: Electron micrograph of an Ebola virus virion | Credit:…

Say Hello To The Two Newest Species Of Vampire Crab

On the left is Geosesarma dennerle, on the right G. hagen. Both have yellow eyes, hence “vampire” crabs. The origins of these colorful crustaceans, which have long been sold as pets, have eluded scientists for years. Now, researchers have given them official names, and traced them to their Indonesian source. Photo Credits: Left and right…

Why Are You Nearsighted? Here’s An Explanation You May Not Have Heard.

Nearsightedness is reaching epidemic levels worldwide, but nowhere is its rise more prevalent than East Asia, where as many as 90% of teenagers and young adults now suffer from blurry distance vision. Why the sudden spike? Book work has long been blamed, but recent findings point to something else. Photo Credit: Cathy via flickr |…

Why You Need To Avoid Those All-Too-Frequent “Sad Desk Lunches”

You know by now that sitting prunes lifespans, negates workouts, and outright kills people. Ugh, sitting. The worst, right? Well, not technically. Standing too much is also bad for you, and apparently plain old sitting can’t hold a candle (in terms of sheer terribleness) to eating lunch while sitting at your desk. And yet, an…

How Did This Arabic-Inscribed Ring End Up In A 9th-Century Viking Grave?

Ancient texts tell of encounters between Viking Age Scandavia and the Islamic world, but material evidence supporting the interaction of these two civilizations is rare. This ring, recently reexamined more than 100 years after its discovery in a ninth century Viking grave, lends credence to these accounts. Photo Credit: Christer Åhlin / The Swedish History…