Magazine issue: Vol. 193, No. 2, February 3, 2018, p. 7 OXON HILL, Md. — Future spacecraft could navigate by the light of dead stars. Using only the timing of radiation bursts from pulsating stellar corpses, an experiment on the International Space Station was able to pinpoint its location in space in a first-ever demonstration. The technique […]
Read More Spaceships Could Use Pulsars as a GPSNASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just took the farthest-ever images from Earth, breaking an earlier record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image taken almost exactly 28 years ago. In December 2017, New Horizons took these false-color images of objects in the Kuiper Belt, the farthest from Earth ever captured by a spacecraft. They’re also […]
Read More NASA Just Published the Farthest-Ever Images Taken in SpaceBy Matt Williams On July 2nd, 1967, the U.S. Vela 3 and 4 satellites noticed something rather perplexing. Originally designed to monitor for nuclear weapons tests in space by looking for gamma radiation, these satellites picked up a series of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) coming from deep space. And while decades have passed since the “Vela Incident“, astronomers are still […]
Read More Physicists Have Created an Artificial Gamma Ray Burst in the LabCat Rambo, President of the SFWA, features some awesome SFF authors in On Demand classes available from her website. Her latest featured Ann Leckie on Space Opera. Leckie’s space opera novel Ancillary Justice won just about every award in the SFF field a couple of years ago. The following quotes Cat Rambo’s Twitter thread featuring […]
Read More Writing Space Opera According to Ann Leckie & Cat RamboIN BRIEF Using data collected from their network of telescopes, the Event Horizons Telescope team hopes to produce the first ever image of a black hole in 2018. FIRST LOOK AT A BLACK HOLE Within the next 12 months, astrophysicists believe they’ll be able to do something that’s never been done before, and it could […]
Read More This Year, We’ll See a Black Hole for the First TimeBy Alex Acks I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy almost as long as I’ve been able to read, and I’m normally very good at suspending my disbelief. Unfortunately, seven years of university schooling and two degrees have now placed some suspension limits on certain areas—namely geology, landforms, and maps. I tend to notice little things like […]
Read More The Science of Desert PlanetsAncillary Justice by Ann Leckie My rating: 5 of 5 stars Read for the 12 Awards in 12 Months Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge, and the Space Opera Challenge. This book won pretty much every freakin’ award available to SFF writers: 2013 BSFA Winner 2013 Golden Tentacle Winner 2013 Nebula Winner 2013 Tiptree […]
Read More Book Review: Ancillary Justice by Ann LeckieBy Abbey White One of science fiction’s most famous food tropes, spice often exists as something outside its everyday culinary use. Whether a deadly, interstellar travel enhancer in Frank Herbert’s Dune, a magical form of seduction in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices, a drug in George Lucas’s Star Wars or currency in EA Games sci-fi simulation Spore, across mediums […]
Read More Why Spice Is a Staple of Science FictionBy Mara Johnson-Groh The space high above Earth may seem empty, but it’s a carnival packed with magnetic field lines and high-energy particles. This region is known as the magnetosphere and, every day, charged particles put on a show as they dart and dive through it. Like tiny tightrope walkers, the high-energy electrons follow the […]
Read More NASA Studies the Magnetosphere
