http://startswithabang.com Ethan Siegel's blog/video blog about Cosmology, the Universe, and everything else Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:12:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en To all of my fantastic readers, and you all are fantastic, I want to thank you for all of your support, your questions, your comments, and the information you've helped bring to the world during our time together here at startswithabang.com! Our new site is up and live over at Scienceblogs, ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1706 Well, it's happening this week, folks! I'm going to make the move over to ScienceBlogs this week, and I will have a special good-bye video post this Wednesday. In the meantime, to help you cope with your sadness, Ian O'Neill at AstroEngine has this week's Carnival of Space, and I ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1704 So, to send a crew to Mars (round-trip), you need them to commit to being completely isolated, with only sporadic communication with Earth, for two years at minimum! And that's assuming you take the minimum time to get there and back, which means you're only on the surface for ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1699 There was a question on the straight dope message board today that was way too interesting for me to pass up. But it took a long time to crunch the numbers for it, so this post is late! Someone named Richard Parker wants to know whether he should get married... ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1683 As many of you have heard, NASA has had a public vote to help name the new node of the International Space Station -- node 3 -- shown here in its full glory: Although the name Serenity for the new node got 70% of the vote on the NASA site, that's ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1680 When we look out at galaxies, we find the most energetic particles we've ever found anywhere in the Universe coming from their centers. Why? Because as far as we can tell, all galaxies, at their centers, have huge, supermassive black holes! When matter (like a star, globular cluster, intra-galactic ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1672 This Australian "mammal" is one of the most bizarre creatures on Earth, having many of the characteristics usually reserved for either birds only or mammals only: Ladies and gentlemen, the duck-billed platypus! Its most notable features are as follows: 1. It lays eggs. This is usually reserved exclusively for birds, ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1662 Schadenfreude (IPA: [ˈʃaːdənˌfʁɔʏ̯də]) -- largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate. Every once in awhile, everyone has a bad day. I had one on Wednesday, where nothing seemed to go right the entire day. And sometimes, immature though it is, it ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1660 I really get a kick out of reading The Straight Dope. What started as a weekly column in a Chicago newspaper has grown into a nationwide phenomenon and a small empire, and is often full of fascinating questions and extremely well-researched and knowledgeable answers. But doesn't anyone there know to ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1651 Attraction and repulsion are two of the simplest concepts in electricity and magnetism: like charges repel and opposite charges attract. (Two steps forward, two steps back.) For electricity, this is how positive and negative charges work: Two positive charges will repel each other, two negative charges will repel each ... http://startswithabang.com/?p=1643