Crash Analysis: How SpaceShipTwo's Feathered Tails Work
The cause of the deadly crash of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo on Friday remains unknown, but the commercial spaceplane's feathered reentry system looks to have been involved.
Cosmic-Ray Telescope Flies High
The new detector passes tests involving a helicopter, balloon and lasers
Kuiper Belt Missions Could Reveal the Solar System’s Origins
For the first time, spacecraft will get an up-close look at comets, asteroids and dwarf planets from the distant Kuiper belt. These probes should reveal how the solar system came to be
Physics Week in Review: November 1, 2014
Hope everyone enjoyed their Halloween festivities. Here’s a few other related links: The ghostly glow of St. Elmo’s fire: it works the same way that a neon light glows. The Levitating Halloween Pumpkin with a superconductor inside. Bonus: More Conceptual Physics Halloween Costumes.This year, go out as The Holographic Principle!
'Theory of Everything' Brilliantly Dramatizes Paradox of Modern Science
I met Stephen Hawking in the summer of 1990, when I spent five days in northern Sweden at a conference attended by 30 or so leading cosmologists.
Failure to Launch Is Always An Option
Do not try this at home. A Russian Proton-M launch goes wrong – and it can happen to anyone (wait for the shock wave). A rocket is a controlled bomb.
Quantum World Proposed to Arise from Many Ordinary Ones
A radical theory proposes that interactions among classical worlds can explain some quantum phenomena
Evidence Builds for Dark Matter Explosions at the Milky Way’s Core
Unexplained gamma rays streaming from the galactic center may have been produced by dark matter, but more mundane explanations are also possible
Complex Life Owes Its Existence To Parasites?
Is complex life rare in the cosmos? The idea that it could be rests on the observation that the existence of life like us – with large, energy hungry, complicated cells – may be contingent on a number of very specific and unlikely factors in the history of the Earth.
Recent Lunar Discoveries Reveal a "New Moon"
Think you know about the Moon? I did, but then I started reading ‘The New Moon: Water, Exploration, and Future Habitation‘ (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and realized that my knowledge amounted to a teensy scrap of lunar dust.
Surfer-Physicist Offers Alternative to String Theory, Academia
In 2007 Garrett Lisi was a 39-year-old physicist, unaffiliated with any institution, toiling in obscurity on what he called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” which could account for all of nature’s forces.
Track Cosmic Rays with Smartphone App
Take part in a citizen-science project by helping researchers track high-energy cosmic rays via a network of smartphone users. Clara Moskowitz reports