The Biscuit Basin Explosion The world’s first national park – Yellowstone – contains over half of Earth’s geysers. Powering this incredible fact is the Yellowstone Caldera, an underground supervolcano. Though currently dormant in terms of overground eruption, the system isn’t extinct and still heats the region, creating Old Faithful and the other gushers inside the park. Worrywarts across […]
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Uranus Is Cold Really cold. You should probably get that checked out. The amount of light a body receives plummets exponentially as the distance to a star increases (the formula is 1/distance squared). Uranus is just over 19 astronomical units away from the Sun, meaning it gets 0.27% of the sunlight we receive on Earth
Red Adair, the Munroe Effect, & the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter On 20 February 1962, John Glenn became the third American to visit space, as Friendship 7 left Earth. When the craft successfully orbited our planet, Glenn was the first American to circle Earth above the atmosphere. He orbited three times during the nearly five-hour mission, giving Glenn
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The Bone Wars Many progenitors of scientific fields garner reverent reputations as time passes, perhaps titans of inquiry, research, and genius who placed pure scholarship above all else. We tend to view Newton and Einstein as ascetic paragons, infallibly probing the fabric of the universe for nothing more than the good of humanity. Of course,
Parade of Planets Gazing into the night sky can impart a viewer with a sobering sense of perspective. The billions of stars out there. The millions of years the light took to travel from distant galaxies. It’s easy to be overwhelmed with a feeling of unimportance, as if we’re a speck of sand on a
The Carrington Event It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded […]. The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it
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Sunspots, Solar Flares, & CMEs In Part I of this series, we discovered the Sun emits more than just visible light. The outermost portion of the Sun – the corona – becomes so hot that particles gather enough kinetic energy to escape the star’s gravity. As these masses flee the Sun, they become the solar wind, moving
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Sunlight & Solar Wind Stars are the gnarly dynamos of the largely empty universe. Packed with nuclear reactors at their cores, these bodies make life possible. The number of factors that allow Earth to teem with life is high enough to make one believe in serendipity. We owe everything to our star – the Sun
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Retention & Detention Small, artificial ponds have gained ubiquity in modern developments, such as neighborhoods and commercial centers. The body might have a fountain in the center, and a gaggle of annoying geese might chill there. They often feature an unnatural quality – geometry too straight or incongruous with the surroundings. Despite sticking out to
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Doctor Orangutan We tend to view elite intelligence as a human monopoly. Sure, ravens, dolphins, and other primates display some impressive mental feats, but they didn’t devise general relativity or split the atom. Dogs, cats, and goats might be fit to run cities but we don’t usually allow them to hold positions of real consequence. You wouldn’t