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, […]
Tag: Planets
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 […]
Horton Sees a Pluto
Meg Muckenhoupt wrote a poem about Pluto: Horton Sees a Pluto [AIR 15:5] On a hot night in August, while strolling in Prague, Horton the elephant peered through the fog. With his portable telescope tied on a string He looked at the heavens and spotted… a thing! So Horton stopped walking and stared at the spot. […]
Earth: A small chance to win a big trip
Adding to our knowledge that the residents of planet earth are unstable, Jacques Laskar (pictured here) and Mickael Gastineau of the Observatoire de Paris calculate that so, too, is our planet’s residency in the solar system. Thanks to an instability in the entire system, we could all win a big trip to far-off places. Details […]