salem6sci

"Easy science experiments and science fair project ideas that make learning fun."

"There are just some things that are synonymous with "summertime snacks," and we can't think of a summer snack we enjoy quite as much as s'mores. But what would you do if you weren't allowed to have a fire or just didn't have the tools necessary for a fire? We came up with a pretty neat way to harness the heat and energy of the sun to create a solar powered cooker that makes a delicious batch of s'mores without a fire!"

"When you hear about a volcano erupting, what do you think is going on? If you're like us, you think of red hot chunks of rock being hurled thousands of feet in the air, flows of liquid magma, and plumes of smoke. That's not always the case. Some volcanoes erupt underwater and their smoking hot by-products are immediately cooled. With the Storm in a Cup, you can see what happens underwater on a smaller, safer scale."

"The Hubble space telescope has captured an image of a "barred spiral" galaxy that could help us better understand our own Milky Way. Most of the known spiral galaxies fall into this "barred" category - which are defined by the pronounced bar structure across their centres. The presence of this structure may be an indication of a galaxy's age"

"Astronomers are worried. It's not some new unexplained mystery of the universe or the upcoming launch of a space telescope that is unnerving them, though. The problems they currently face are much more down-to-Earth - and the future of space exploration hangs in the balance. The anxiety stems from the fact that astronomy, especially space-based astronomy, is just plain expensive. And with federal budgets tightening, the government will be less and less able to make huge investments in big science projects. "We may see in the next decade or so an end to the search for the laws of nature which will not be resumed again in our own lifetimes," warned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg in January during the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas."

""I think that when people see Pluto (during the New Horizons flyby), they're going to figure out what a lot of planetary scientists have already figured out," Stern said. "Is that the outer solar system is teeming with small planets ... (Pluto) is admittedly a new "species" of planet if you will." "It's as if we had traveled the world and only found large dogs like the Labrador and never found the Chihuahuas. Well, would we say they're not dogs just because there's too many of them and we can't keep track of their names and they are smaller?""

"Solar System debris rains down on Earth in vast quantities - more than a hundred tons of it a day. Most of it vaporizes in our atmosphere, leaving stunning trails of light we call shooting stars. More hazardous are the billions, likely trillions, of leftover rocks - comets and asteroids - that wander interplanetary space in search of targets. Most asteroids are made of rock. The rest are metal, mostly iron. Some are rubble piles - gravitationally bound collections of bits and pieces. Most live between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and will never come near Earth. But some do. Some will. More than a thousand known asteroids are classed as "potentially hazardous," based on size and trajectory. Currently, it looks doable to develop an early-warning and defense system that could protect the human species from impactors larger than a kilometer wide. Smaller ones, which reflect much less light and are therefore much harder to detect at great distances, carry enough energy to incinerate entire nations, but they don't put the human species at risk of extinction."

"There could be many billions of planets not much bigger than Earth circling faint stars in our galaxy, says an international team of astronomers. The estimate for the number of "super-Earths" is based on detections already made and then extrapolated to include the Milky Way's population of so-called red dwarf stars."

"The BBC has created a very, very large infographic titled "How Big Is Our Solar System?" Scroll down (which is a little odd) and it will take you from the surface of earth to the far reaches of space. It's similar to a couple of other infographics: Scroll to see the ocean's deepest depths is an interactive infographic from The BBC. Scroll down the infographic and it not only shows you information about what is happening at that depth of the ocean, it also provides videos and images. "Our Amazing Planet: Top To Bottom," is another one, but there's no interactivity and it also covers above the ocean."

"Russia plans to send probes to Jupiter and Venus, land a network of unmanned stations on Mars and ferry Russian cosmonauts to the surface of the Moon - all by 2030. That's according to a leaked document from the country's space agency. Wired U.K. The cosmically ambitious plans were submitted to the government by the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) this month, according to a report in the Kommersant, Russia's business-focused daily newspaper. The document lays out a blueprint for the country's space industry to follow in the next 18 years, up to 2030. It's rare for Russia to set a deadline for its future space plans."

"Science and communism are inseparable! That is the basic message of this amazing collection of Soviet space propaganda posters that will be auctioned off on Apr. 22. Featuring Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov, the first and second humans to reach space, along with Krushchev, and of course Lenin, these posters glorify the the Soviet Union's technological prowess and importance in the world, and in the universe. Many of the posters focus on the role the workers played in the space race, and the ordinary citizen's duty to feel immensely proud of Mother Russia's accomplishments. The posters have messages such as "Comrades! Soviet Land Has From Now On Become the Shore of the Universe!" or "The Tenth Planet Symbolizes the Victory of Communism!" and "Be Proud, Soviet, You Opened a Path from the Earth to the Stars!" One of my favorites is "Lenin Is With Us, Immortal and Majestic, the Thoughts, Words and Deeds of Ilyich Are Propagating Through the Universe.""

"From PayPal to electric cars to rockets, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk wants his company, SpaceX, to build America's next manned spacecraft. Scott Pelley reports."

A pretty neat interactive gadget that lets users explore the Mars Rover.

"One of the biggest bummers about Mars Rover Curiosity's epic landing is that there was no news crew on the surface to catch footage of the descent. This full resolution video of Curiosity touching down from its own point of view is the next best thing."

"Curiosity, you are such an amazing space mission that we will sacrifice a thousand blog posts, a million gallons of newsprint even, in your honor. But can you do this? NASA's Cassini probe, not content to be forgotten in its faraway orbit around Saturn and its moons, has beamed back new natural-color images of the ringed planet that are absolutely breathtaking. Released yesterday, they show a very different planet than the one Cassini arrived at eight years ago."

"tarting 35 years ago, our view of the solar system was forever changed. The launch of the Voyager 1 probe on Sept. 5, 1977 ushered in a golden era of planetary exploration. Along with its sister probe, Voyager 2, the spacecraft took the first detailed images of planets in the outer solar system, discovering magnificent rings, churning atmospheric processes, and volcanic activity on tiny moons. Voyager 2 actually launched on Aug. 20, slightly earlier than its counterpart, but took a longer route to reach Jupiter and Saturn after Voyager 1. The Voyager probes were a scaled-back version of a proposed "Grand Planetary Tour" mission, which would have used a rare alignment in the outer solar system to swing from planet to planet with minimal fuel. In the original plan, four spacecraft would have visited all the gas giants and even tiny Pluto (then still a planet). But without budgetary support from President Nixon and Congress, the ambitious mission was canceled. Since the 1977 planetary configuration occurred only once every 177 years, NASA engineers decided to go forward with a new plan - the Voyager probes, two identical robots that would travel to Jupiter and Saturn and, if successful, on to Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1 ultimately performed a closer encounter with Saturn's moon Titan that flung it out of the solar system, and only Voyager 2 made it to the latter planets."

"The Milky Way hosts at least 17 billion Earth-size alien planets, and probably many more, a new study reveals. Astronomers have determined that about 17% of stars in our galaxy harbor a roughly Earth-size exoplanet in a close orbit. Since there are 100 billion or so stars in the Milky Way, that works out to a minimum of 17 billion small, rocky alien worlds, or an Earth-size planet around one of every six stars. And there are probably many more such planets orbiting at greater distances from their stars, some of which may even be "alien Earths" capable of supporting life as we know it."

"Enter the planetary defenders, a group of astronomers, physicists and aerospace engineers who have since the early 1990s been locating flying space rocks, painstakingly plotting their orbits, and thinking of ingenious schemes to drag them off course or blow them up should they be on a trajectory toward us. Finally, they have been imagining how the fractious family of man might come together with a contingency plan to literally save the planet, like Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck in Hollywood's Armageddon. NASA has identified 94% of the huge, potentially civilization-ending asteroids nearby (none of which is on an earth-trajectory for now). But only about 1 percent of the 500,000 Near Earth Objects around the size of 2012 DA14 orbiting near earth's orbit have been tracked. The space agency's global Spaceguard program connects professional and amateur telescopes looking for smaller NEOs. A telescope in Spain picked 2012 DA14 when it was 2.7 million miles away, and reported it to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge. Later,scientists calculated its trajectory, based on a few plot points of its movement."