The New Horizons mission to Pluto (and beyond)
Barrie W. Jones is an astronomer whose new book, Pluto: Sentinel of the Outer Solar System, deals with the discovery and exploration of planetoid Pluto. In this excerpt, he describes New Horizons, a spacecraft that will visit Pluto in 2015. We would clearly learn a lot more about Pluto, its three satellites, the E-K belt,…
Terry Pratchett’s young witch comes of age at last
Tiffany Aching, the teenage witch who stars in Terry Pratchett’s latest novel I Shall Wear Midnight, is in many ways the anti-Harry Potter. True, she’s a precocious pubescent who gets to ride a broomstick and save the day, but the final installment of her four-novel series of adventures is no jolly tale of boarding school,…
Where are all the great new horror books?
Horror used to have its own burgeoning section in major bookstores — now it’s been pushed to the sidelines. Blogger Michael Ferrante wonders where all the great horror fiction has gone. Last year, when doing my October month of horror fiction (and likely at least once before that) I’ve mentioned the difficulty I’ve had in…
Nook Color: Barnes & Noble’s Full-Color Tablet With Apps, Mags and Books for $250
Barnes & Noble’s touchscreen Nook Color—a reading-centric, 7-inch Android tablet with full color books, magazines, newspapers and apps is well, surprisingly good. It might be the best Android tablet yet, even. Update: Video! The Hardware The new Nook sports a seven inch 1024×600 full-color LCD touchscreen made by LG, accelerometer-enabled for both portrait and landscape…