Happy New Year to all living beings! Live long and prosper. It’s been a troublesome and unpredictable 2016 — not that the clump of 365 consecutive days has any particular significance, but si
On June 19th, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova returned to earth after three days and 49 orbits. making her the first woman to travel in outer space. Her landing near Baevo, Altai was quite rough. Since t
Vostok 1 - (12 Apr 1961) Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. Vostok 2 - (6 Aug 1961) Gherman Titov, the first man to spend one day in space. Vostok 3
“Behold the astronaut, fully equipped for duty: a scaly creature, more like an oversized ant than a primate — certainly not a naked god. To survive on the moon he must be encased in an even mo
How is it that my brother, Po, marooned out in the wilds of the high desert at Canyon Blanco is first one to tell me about the synthetic brain news? Here I am, wired up to the ears with wireless routers zapping me and servers buzzing underfoot…only a beer cap toss from a major data center…and as far as I knew I had a unique and unreplaceable hunk of gray matter floating in my skull. Sure it’s a little frayed around the edges, has its foibles, is a beast when it comes to cold starts on a winter morning, but still - after all it’s been through - it seemed a right decent old brain, as far as I was concerned. But now we know that these dweebs over at Blue Brain Project have already concocted a rat’s brain, and are madly tuning their skills to create a human brain within ten years. BBC Story Is it just me, or does that seem like it might not work out according to plan?
Did SF become irrelevant after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969? This panel explored the relationship between the Apollo program and SF, and the ways in which SF did or didn’t live up to its visionary potentials after manned space flight became a reality. Paul De Fillippo kicked things off by asking to what extent SF inspired the space program? And to what extent did the eventual breakdown of the manned space program affect SF?
It’s been raining for a few days here, and I noticed some strange fungus growing on a stump along the Minuteman Bike Path. Little did I know that two days later it would be erupting into a giant ora
On a trip to Vienna last week, I was happy as a clam to find a copy of “Das Bildbuch der Welt Raum Fahrt,” [Picture Book of Space Travel] which documents the latest advances in Space Trav