Thanksgiving is a special time for most Americans, but only one citizen will have a truly out-of-this world holiday experience. NASA astronaut Kevin Ford will celebrate Thanksgiving in space while orbiting about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Ford commands the International Space Station’s Expedition 34 mission, and he’s the only American aboard the…
Wild turkeys and buffalo have more in common than you might guess. Both were important as food for Native Americans and European settlers. And both were nearly obliterated. There were a couple of reasons for the turkey’s decline. In the early years of the U.S., there was no regulation, so people could shoot as many…
Much of the internet is buzzing over upcoming “big news” from NASA’s Curiosity rover, but the space agency’s scientists are keeping quiet about the details. The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil…
The American Indian Student Union at the University of Virginia has upset some conservative students on campus with an “Anti-Thanksgiving” event. The student group planned and advertised the “Anti-Thanksgiving” event as a potluck where students would “share free food.” They also recently held a screening of “The Only Good Indian,” a film about a Native…
For all Il Papa’s social media encouragement the last few years, the Roman Catholic Church continues to struggle with digital ministry practice, particularly where new media intersects the Church’s medieval sacramental structure. In 2011, a new smartphone app aimed to support preparation for and the practice of confession ended up generating more confusion than contrition…
A smattering of white spots found among the ink in medieval books aren’t just printing errors — they’re actually an amazingly detailed “fossil” record of European beetles, new research finds. The dots represent spots, or wormholes, where hatching beetles chewed their way out of the woodblocks used to print art and illustrations between the 1400s…
Finding a good alternative energy stock isn’t easy, investors are finding. One problem is that is that the market in general has dropped since the election. Also, alternative-energy stocks tend to lag when the price of oil falls. Another problem is that some alternative-energy companies are start-ups with little in the way of earnings.
A study using a unique new instrument on the world’s largest optical telescope has revealed the likely origins of especially bright supernovae that astronomers use as easy-to-spot “mile markers” to measure the expansion and acceleration of the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe observations of recent supernova 2011fe that…
For the first time, ESA’s Planck space telescope has detected a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart. Abell 399 and Abell 401, each containing hundreds of galaxies, are billions of light years away. The presence of hot gas linking them had already been hinted at in X-ray…
The gap has widened between countries’ pledges for reducing climate-altering greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and what is needed to keep planet warming in check, the UN warned. Based on current pledges, global average temperatures could rise by three to five degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9.0 degrees Fahrenheit) this century — way above the two…