Dr. Franck Marchis, a planetary astronomer known for research on exoplanets and asteroids with moons, was awarded the Carl Sagan Center Director's Award. Marchis co-founded and is Chief Scientific Officer for Unistellar, fostering a global community of over 12,000 citizen astronomers. The evening also recognized Reed Spurling with the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Award of Excellence.
#PPOD: Enjoy this aesthetically stunning picture and consider the latitude at which it was captured. This is Portonovo (45N), a small town near Mount Conero in the province of Ancona in Italy. (We had it pretty good in San Francisco - 37N with purple and green). This low latitude tells you the strength of that solar storm that just hit. In fact, aurorae were observed in the Caribbean! Before May 12, only the Carrington Event reached those latitudes. Credit: Michele Elisei
Particle physics and cosmology go hand-in-hand, despite the vast difference in scales. So when something new starts brewing in the quantum world, we pay attention. On this week’s Big Picture Science - could physics experiments take us “Beyond the Standard Model?”
For World Turtle Day, please enjoy this 54-million-year-old fossil of a baby sea turtle, which was found in Denmark and includes preserved soft tissue.
In fact, it's so well-preserved that scientists discovered molecules of a pigment that would have darkened the turtle's shell, perhaps to protect it against sun damage.
The 2008 book, A TIME TRAVELLER'S FIELD NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS OF DINOSAURS; I'll post a bunch of my illustrations. It is a fictional story, so be prepared for plenty of inaccuracies, for example, there is no evidence for autotomy in Tanystropheus.