Tardigrades on Far-Off Planets, Measuredly, Theoretically [research study]

One can rate far-off planets by their cosiness—especially the extremes, good or bad, of coziness—as homes or potential homes to tardigrades. That’s what this study tries to do: “Tardigrade Indexing Approach on Exoplanets,” Madhu Kashyap Jagadeesh, Milena Roszkowska, and Łukasz Kaczmarek, Life Science in Space Research, epub 2018. The authors, at Jyoti Nivas College, India, […]

Planetary Tea, Relatively (the physics thereof)

British tea preparation now includes preparation for possible visits to other planets. This study presents some of the relevant calculations: “Tea Time in the Solar System,” Hannah Natasha Lerman, Benedict Irwin, and Peter Hicks, Physics Special Topics, vol. 12, no. 1, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Nigel Rawson for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, […]

Astronomical objects & human children

University of Tel Aviv astronomer Alon Retter alerts us to his provocative paper positing a mathematical similarity between astronomical objects and human children. Retter’s monography is another example of the spectacular nature of many research papers in the small, new viXra depository (profiled here recently; see “Alternate everything: the joy of viXra“) as compared to […]