Selfies. Definitely notorious in the digital world. Who hasn’t wrinkled up their nose in disgust at a friend’s shameless self-promotion or puckered up a duck face for the camera? Or maybe selfies power your voyage of exploration for personal acceptance, understanding and confidence. Universally reviled, or defended as an act of self-expression. A moment of attention-grabbing… Read More »Reflecting Self
Talk Science To Me staff are a bunch of hard-nosed, emotionless science communicators who check their feelings at the door each day to report the cold, hard facts…
Okay, strike that — as you know from previous blog posts, we’re passionate about science and unafraid of wearing our hearts on our sleeves. When little Philae crashed onto Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko almost two years ago, staff joined many others around the world in getting a little teary about its last tweet. As the lander, lost and off course, settled into what could have been a terminal nap, we were left with the image of the ever-present Rosetta orbiter circling a lump of icy rock in deep space, hovering expectantly for its little friend to wake up and communicate once more. Definitely Pixar-worthy!
Most of the things in our “Treasures” series are living organisms. I think this is partly because lots of living organisms are easy to identify with: they exist on a scale similar to ours and are easy to categorize as discrete entities. Phenomena are a little harder to sell, for the most part. Stellar nucleosynthesis has had some help though, in the form of Carl Sagan’s wildly popular and surprisingly durable “star stuff” monologue. And it’s true: we’re literally made of atoms that came here from dying stars. Of course this is equally true of centipedes, norovirus and Rob Ford, so admittedly the magic relies on a bit of anthropocentrism.
Read More »Treasures: Stellar NucleosynthesisMy friends and I all have vivid mental pictures of the Tunguska Event, probably because of Carl Sagan’s retelling of it in the original Cosmos series. Recently, another region of Russia—the Urals—was jolted awake by a similar, though smaller, event.
Read More »The Chelyabinsk event