Neil deGrasse
Neil deGrasse
culture alternatives stranger
If cosmological theory were dominated by women, who are no strangers to cycles, how can we know for sure that we wouldn't then be told that the oscillating universe is the more aesthetically fulfilling alternative?
doctors beauty-and-love long
Astronomers do not commonly use Venereal, in favor of the less contagious-sounding Venutian. Blame the medical community, who snatched the word long before astronomers had any good use for it. I suppose you can't blame the doctors. Venus is the goddess of beauty and love, so she ought to be the goddess of its medical consequences.
running moving sunset
During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.
home space needs
When provoked, the itsy-bitsy invertebrates known as tardigrades can suspend their metabolism. In that state, they can survive temperatures of... 73 K for days on end, making them hardy enough to endure being stranded on Neptune. So the next time you need space travelers with the right stuff, you might want to choose yeast and tardigrades, and leave your astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts at home.
media news kevin
The news media reported the $250 million as an unthinkably huge waste of money and proclaimed that something was wrong with NASA. The result was an investigation and a congressional hearing. Not to defend failure, but $250 million is not much more than the cost to produce Kevin Costner's film flop Waterworld.
smart believe doctors
If you are that person, you are more likely to believe that God cured you, this invisible force, creator of the universe, cured you, than that you had three idiotic doctors diagnose you. ... I taught physics to pre-med students who became doctors. Not all of them are smart, I assure you.
democracy world plans
When everyone agrees to a single solution and a single plan, there's nothing more efficient in the world than an efficient democracy.
earth matter aliens
Grab something off the shelf that's on the spaceship-an ashtray, it doesn't matter what. Because I can tell you, if they flew here from another galaxy, no matter what you've pulled off the shelf, it'll be unlike anything we have on Earth.
earth-life two different
I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.
light-years identity purpose
In any case, the leading edge of our "on purpose" radio signals is 30 light-years away and, if intercepted, may mend the aliens' image of us based on the radio bubble of our television shows. But this will happen only if the aliens can somehow determine which type of signal comes closer to the truth of who we are, and what our cosmic identity deserves to be.
would-be earth sound
If our solar system is not unusual, then there are so many planets in the universe that, for example, they outnumber the sum of all sounds and words ever uttered by every human who has ever lived. To declare that Earth must be the only planet with life in the universe would be inexcusably bigheaded of us.
moon sky pseudoscience
I'm a fan of the planets in any combination. When I was born, Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, the Sun, and the Moon were all in the sky.
bad-ass people world
With one linear centimeter of your lower colon there lives and works more bacteria (about 100 billion) that all humans who have ever been born. Yet many people continue to assert that it is we who are in charge of the world
talking sides common
[A]s they are currently practiced, there is no common ground between science and religion....Although just as in hostage negotiations, it's probably best to keep both sides talking to each other.