Episode 2 – Space Opera: livestreamed February 18, 2018. #SpecWomenChat is a livestreamed panel discussion featuring women who work in, and write, SFF. Our Panel: Ann Leckie has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, a lunch lady, and a recording engineer. The author of many published short stories, and […]
Read More #SpecWomenChat Episode 2 – Space OperaI have an interest in the mining of asteroids, which features as a central driver of the plot in my upcoming novel The Cloud. By Philip Metzger Mining asteroids might seem like the stuff of science fiction, but there are companies and a few governments already working hard to make it real. This should not be surprising: […]
Read More Want Faster Data and a Cleaner Planet? Start Mining AsteroidsDownbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh My rating: 5 of 5 stars Read for the 12 in 12 Challenge, the LGBTQ Speculative Fiction Challenge,, the Military Spec-Fic Reading Challenge, the Women of Genre Fiction Challenge, the Grand Mistresses of Genre Fiction Challenge, the Hard Core Sci-Fi Challenge, the Read the Sequel Challenge, and the Space Opera […]
Read More Book Review: Downbelow Station by C.J. CherryhMagazine 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 LabBy Jay Bennett The Hypatia stone is only a few centimeters across, broken into pebble fragments, but it may very well be the most interesting rock in the world. Named for Hypatia of Alexandria, the first prominent Western woman astronomer and mathematician, the colorful rock was found in 1996 in western Egypt by Aly Barakat, […]
Read More ‘Hypatia’ Stone Contains Compounds Not Found in the Solar SystemIN 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 PlanetsBy 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
