Category: Blog

The “greatest unsolved problem in mathematics” may not be unsolved any longer; Purdue University mathematician Louis De Branges says he’s solved it. You can read his 23-page paper here, assuming you have the mathematical knowledge to understand it. I, alas, don’t!

A moment of silence, please, for Albert Fia, father of Canadian rocketry, who developed the still-used Black Brant research rockets in the early 1960s.

Having just read Simon Winchester’s book Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, this story about erupting Indonesian volcanoes caught my eye. Personally, I like living in an extremely geologically stable part of the world!

…on Mars. At least, there was once!

Here’s an excellent image of today’s transit of Venus, as photographed by the Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) satellite. It was cloudy here, so I’m just as glad I didn’t get up early enough to try to see it with my ancient Tasco refractor.

If you’re a kid interested in astronomy, as I was, there are few thrills to compare with your first view of the rings of Saturn. So you can imagine how excited astronomers (and ex-kids like myself) are with the imminent arrival of the International Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn. The $3 billion space probe, launched October …

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…and the world will beat a path to your door. Carbon nanotubes could give us the first major redesign of the incandescent light bulb in more than a century.

…to watch the Transit of Venus, courtesy of the University of Wales Aberystwyth. No one alive has ever seen this phenomenon; the last time it happened was 1882.

This is cool! Researchers are using optical-scanning equipment to create virtual copies of old analog recordings–vinyl disks, wax cylinders–that sound better and can be played over and over again without damaging the original.

SpaceShipOne, the privately built spaceship competing for the X-prize, has set a launch date–June 21.

…can keep heart disease away, says a new study. Sweet news indeed!