This week, NASA astronomers announced they’d discovered seven Earth-like planets around a star labelled Trappist-1, which is 40 light years away. That means that the view we have of that solar system is how it looked 40 years ago. Conversely, if they could get a good look at Earth, the scientists on those planets would […]
Regarding my post yesterday about vaccinations, Jeff Fishback e-mails: I agree with your premise, to vaccinate all who are possible. Please look to the State of Mississippi for validation. Mississippi had the WORST test scores of school students, in the entire nation. Governor Haley Barbour, a staunch Republican, got bipartisan support to improve the test […]
Last week, I linked to a story about Robert DeNiro joining forces with noted anti-vaxxer Robert Kennedy Jr. to offer $100,000 to anyone who could turn up a study showing that it is safe to administer vaccines to children. Of course, there have been dozens of such studies, but no one will be paid because […]
David Pogue returned to my radio show to promote his next Nova special, “Search For The Super Battery” (airing Wednesday 2/1 on PBS). We talked about improving wind and solar power storage, what went wrong with Samsung’s Note 7 that made it burst into flames, the truth about lithium-ion batteries, and what Elon Musk’s gigafactory […]
In the 1960s, as a small boy growing up on Long Island, I was obsessed with the early space programs, from Mercury to Gemini to Apollo. In late July, 1969, a few days before I turned eleven, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. After watching it on […]
Professor Richard Wiseman emails: For the past few months we have been working on a secret project involving the science of illusion and invisibility! In the 1920s a magician presented the plans for a strange illusion that he claimed would make people invisible. It’s based on an idea used in modern-day invisibility research and so […]