Ethan Siegel

Well, it's happening this week, folks! I'm going to make the move over to ScienceBlogs this week, and I will have a special good-bye video post this Wednesday. In the meantime, to help you cope with your sadness, Ian O'Neill at AstroEngine has this week's Carnival of Space, and I ...

So, to send a crew to Mars (round-trip), you need them to commit to being completely isolated, with only sporadic communication with Earth, for two years at minimum! And that's assuming you take the minimum time to get there and back, which means you're only on the surface for ...

There was a question on the straight dope message board today that was way too interesting for me to pass up. But it took a long time to crunch the numbers for it, so this post is late! Someone named Richard Parker wants to know whether he should get married... ...

As many of you have heard, NASA has had a public vote to help name the new node of the International Space Station -- node 3 -- shown here in its full glory: Although the name Serenity for the new node got 70% of the vote on the NASA site, that's ...

When we look out at galaxies, we find the most energetic particles we've ever found anywhere in the Universe coming from their centers. Why? Because as far as we can tell, all galaxies, at their centers, have huge, supermassive black holes...

This Australian "mammal" is one of the most bizarre creatures on Earth, having many of the characteristics usually reserved for either birds only or mammals only: Ladies and gentlemen, the duck-billed platypus! Its most notable features are as follows: 1. It lays eggs...

There are a lot of people reporting, right now, on the new memo that President Obama has just signed about science, stem cell research, and his administration's policy: Obama said scientific decisions should be based on facts, not ideology...

Henry Rollins. Liar. Beavis and Butthead. And thanks to the power of youtube, I present, for your viewing pleasure: Has missing the point of everything ever been so entertaining as when these guys do it? Thank you Mike Judge, for Office Space, for King of the Hill, ...

I was going to write about something else today, but when I saw this story, I simply couldn't resist. Apparently, the Illinois state legislature not only declared that Pluto is a planet like the other eight: They also declared that March 13, 2009 is going to be the very first ...

This morning, I was driving to work and the song Such Great Heights by Iron and Wine came on my iPod; click the play button below to listen while you read. But I was listening to the lyrics, and one line from the chorus has been haunting me all day: They will ...

Sometimes, when I come home from a long day at work and need to unwind, I start reading BBC News, and occasionally the news archives are more interesting than the actual present news. Last night, I came across a really interesting read from 2005, about Project Paperclip, which was the US ...

One of the beautiful things about facebook is reuniting and catching up with old friends that you haven't seen in a very long time. Caroline was one of those people for me, someone I knew in high school and thought was awesome, and just lost touch with when we ...

I haven't read comic books regularly since I was about 14. The idea of superheroes always intrigued me, for the simple reason that the problems we face in ordinary life often seem very taxing for us ordinary people to deal with. I always liked heroes with great power, ...

I've been interested in the planet Jupiter ever since I was told, as a little boy, that it was the place I needed to go. Although, come to think of it, I was lumped in with all boys, and told that we "go to Jupiter to get more stupider," ...

I wrote an article last week where I talked about our Universe when it was younger, and discussed that you can't see too far back because it's too dusty. In the same way that a fog obscures distant objects, I said, this neutral hydrogen will obscure distant galaxies, and ...

The Earth and the Sun. So inextricably linked, with both of them being so necessary for the life we observe today. We live in a fortuitous, wet world, in just the right spot for liquid water to thrive. And we've been in just the right spot for over four ...

Since the recession has hit, the performing arts have been really struggling to survive. I think that makes this one of the most important times to patronize the arts, if you have any interest at all in them. This includes theatre, symphony, and dance. Well, last night was the ...

It's hard to believe that the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. Seriously, do you realize how big of a number that is? If you would condense the entire history of the Universe into one calendar year, your lifetime would take up the last 0.2 seconds of ...

We've talked before about how you can make time around you speed up. Go into a spaceship, travel close to the speed of light, and come back to where you started. When you land your spaceship, you will have aged "normally" for you, but everyone who remained on ...

One of the worst arguments out there against evolution is that we can see micro-evolution, in simple organisms, but not macro-evolution, or evolution in large plants and animals with long lifetimes...

I can't believe that it's been over a year, and I've so rarely taken the opportunity to write about one of the great loves of my life: music. How do I know that I truly love it? The same way I know I love anything; I have the ...

Yes, it's Friday the 13th. I don't care. Yes, it's also the day before Valentine's Day. Still don't care. What's neat about today? The website I go to for daily puzzles and brain teasers had a physics riddle today. I think it's super neat. ...

February 12, 2009, marks the 200th birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin. And while recent scientific discoveries highlight humanity's great diversity, our common ancestry and our equal abilities across a wide class of categories are what I like to think about on this day...

Some days the questions I get are easy, and some days I get questions from our longtime reader, Ben. This past week, there have been reports all over the news that our world may be a giant hologram. Let's take a look at what's going on. In Hanover, Germany, ...

I normally try to keep my nose out of areas where I'm in over my head. In other words, there are areas where I'm an expert, and there are areas where I keep myself as informed as I can, but I have to rely on experts for their information. ...

No, not like this: I mean, what if there were software that virtually let you go under the sea, and explore the ocean floors of the Earth? You know, just like Google Earth, except submarine-style? What would you get? Welcome to Google Earth 5.0, just released this past week, which ...

Looking at our galaxy, and knowing there are hundreds of billions of stars in it, I can't help but wonder how many other worlds there are out there like Earth. I wonder how many other rocky planets are close to their stars, I wonder how many of those planets ...

So you've probably (possibly?) heard the news of a neat discovery: scientists have found the smallest planet ever found outside of our Solar System! This newbie is less than twice the size of Earth (only 1.7 times the diameter that we have), although it's very close to its parent ...

Sure, geckos are cute little lizards. They've even been made famous in households across the country by certain car insurance companies. But geckos are pretty miraculous in a way that would make even Spider-Man jealous: Geckos can climb almost anything...

I'm not a film critic. I have no qualifications, other than I like what I like, and I'm generally pleased about the movies I choose to see or own. Well, I hadn't been to the movies for a while, and there were a number of things out that ...

Sometimes people over at the Straight Dope come up with some really interesting questions. It's one of the only forums that I read, and occasional reader Stephen pointed me towards this thread, which basically asks whether we, living on the Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy, occupy a special ...

Alright, here's a quick bonus post for you all. As pointed out by Bad Astronomy, there's an older article from the Chronicle that goes through the Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science. While this is good general advice, I'd like to point out that many legitimate scientists frequently do these ...

On Monday, we told you what the Universe is doing, and it's expanding faster than we can explain. This mysterious expansion's cause is unknown, and until we figure it out, the name we give to it is called dark energy. But we do know how to measure what ...