Seeing the transit of Venus is a twice-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The planet passes in front of the Sun on two occasions eight years apart – and then not again for about a century. There was a transit in 2004 and another one will occur tonight. If you miss that, you’ll have to wait until 2117 to […]
The United States, Russia, Japan, the European Union, and SpaceX: what do they all have in common? If all goes smoothly over the next few days, each entity will have successfully, and at some point historically brought a vessel to the International Space Station. Yesterday, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon capsule lifted off en […]
The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant last year brought attention to the safety risks associated with atomic energy. Before Fukushima, nuclear energy was on the rise and many countries developed plans to build more power plants. But after the disaster, nuclear energy became a subject of international debate and […]