This week we’re sharing a CalMatters story looking at the nine-student school the town of Orick could lose and what it would mean for the community. We’re also talking about the much-needed lift from Artemis II and feeding your soul with Humboldt scenery and the music scene. Hit subscribe for weekly updates on local stories.
Space
Posted inNews
Huffman Looks to Abolish U.S. Space Force
North Coast Rep. Jared Huffman has introduced a bill that would abolish the “unnecessary” Space Force created by the Trump administration. “The long-standing neutrality of space has fostered a competitive, non-militarized age of exploration every nation and generation has valued since the first days of space travel. But since its creation under the former Trump […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
ET, Please Phone
Every Thursday evening during the fall of 1979, I’d cycle across the Charles River from Boston’s North End to the Museum of Science for a series of free lectures. Carl Sagan, Lynn Margulis and Philip Morrison entertained and inspired, but none more so than Frank Drake. He’s best known for the “Drake Equation,” a back-of-the-envelope […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Lunar Boondoggle?
We are in the middle of another space race, according to Vice President Mike Pence, “just as we were in the 1960s.” No, not with those Sputnik-launching Ruskies this time. Today’s race is with the Chinese. In his speech to the National Space Council earlier this year, Pence cited, as evidence of China’s lunar ambitions, […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Apollo Plus Fifty
“… this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon … No single space project in this period will be … more important for the long-range exploration of space.” — JFK, May 25, 1961 “I’m not that interested in space.” — JFK, Nov. […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Space Force
In news that could bring a whole new meaning to the term “high AF,” Forbes reported Oct. 8 that cannabis is headed into space. Seriously. Scientists with the bioengineering company Space Tango, which specializes in researching microgravity environments, plans to bring cannabis to NASA’s International Space Station some 250 miles above Earth to study how […]
Posted inNews
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Spotted in North Coast Skies
Three readers reported seeing an unusual light in the southern skies. Most likely this is related to the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket which launched around 7:30 p.m. Pacific time. According to Ars Technica: After it separated from the second stage, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket arrested its forward movement, and began falling […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
TESS the Planet Hunter
Last time, we discussed how NASA’s recently launched Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, will spend the next two years surveying nearly the entire sky to search for planets orbiting nearby stars, up to about 100 light years distant. TESS’s four wide-field cameras will spend a month at a time staring at swaths of the […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The E.T. Equation
“… there must be extraterrestrial civilizations … because the laws of nature that led to the development of life and intelligence on Earth must be the same as those prevailing elsewhere in the universe.” — Robert Zubrin Astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake Equation in 1961 to provoke discussion on how […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Whispers from the Birth of the Universe
Cosmologically speaking, everything changed in May of 1965, when two radio astronomers working for Bell Labs detected a faint whisper of radiation, a fossil relic from the birth of the universe, which pretty much clinched the “Big Bang” theory. The irony is that they weren’t even looking for it, but they won Nobel Prizes anyway. […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Men (and Women) are from Mars … Maybe
Suppose, just suppose, we found life on Mars: microscopic critters happily wiggling and metabolizing under the polar ice, or swimming around in an underground pool of water on the warm flanks of Olympus Mons. What would we find when we examined them close up? In particular, how would they reproduce? Would they be like life […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Einstein, Newton andthe Eclipse of 1919
Britain launched two expeditions to observe the total eclipse of May 29, 1919. One was from Greenwich Observatory, under the direction of the British Astronomer Royal Frank Dyson. “He was at that time very skeptical about [Einstein’s] theory, though deeply interested in it; and he realized its very great importance,” wrote Arthur Eddington, director of […]