By Allison Kubo More cold war science in case you enjoyed our last cold war science article: the atomic-powered-nuclear-weapon-silo-ice-sculpture. In 1958, the Central Intelligence Agency started project Corona, a top-secret mission to perform photographic surveillance of the Soviet Union. Of course, this is before digital cameras. Current digital cameras use charge-coupled devices (CCD) which an array of capacitors transfer the photons that hit them into electrical signals. Although the development of the CCD began only a year after Project Corona, it wasn’t until the 1970s that it wa ..read more

  By: Hannah Pell Image credit: Wikimedia Commons. In early May 2021, a ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline caused massive disruption to the East Coast’s fuel supply. Pictures of cars lined up at gas stations and warnings not to “panic buy” gasoline evoked memories of the 1973 oil crisis. Colonial Pipeline Co. paid a $4.4 million ransom demanded by the hackers — which the Federal Bureau of Investigations has since recovered — and chose to shut down the pipeline for the first time in its 57-year history, avoiding the possibility of the hackers gaining direct control o ..read more

  By: Hannah Pell “If we conceive a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are still as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us,” wrote James Clerk Maxwell in his Theory of Heat (1871). With this sentence, Maxwell cast considerable doubt on the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease. (Think of how air always flows from hot to cold, eventually reaching thermal equilibrium). Such a “being ..read more

  Considering how much space junk is in orbit, the need to maintain and monitor cislunar space (the region between Earth and the Moon) is becoming an increasingly important issue. To do so effectively may require spacecraft that can propel for longer durations than currently available, and nuclear reactors may offer a solution. Recent news of progress utilizing nuclear technology to power extended spaceflight — from the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program, SpaceNukes, among others — is an opportunity to reexamine the history of this technology and pinpoint ..read more

  Allison Kubo Hutchison We’ve already covered some important questions like do trilobites bites (spoiler: they don’t) but recent research has given insight into another important question: what is it like to be eaten by a baby T-Rex? The answer is it is between being eaten by a hyena and a crocodile. To get this result, first paleontologists uncovered a fossil with bite marks that are thought to be from a young T. rex specimen. The spacing and dimensions of punctures on the fossilized vertebrae of an edmontosaurus, a type of duck-billed dinosaur, were compared to various T. rex fossils ..read more

By Allison Kubo Hutchison USGS: Pyroclastic flow at Mount Saint Helens on August 7, 1980. The volcano erupts. The immense pressure within the volcano due to the build-up of gases causes fragmentation. The thicker and more viscous the magma the more fragmentation occurs (Read more about that here). The fragmented magma cools into sharp, glasslike ash and larger blocks. It hurtles out of the volcano and forms a pyroclastic flow. Of all volcanic hazards, pyroclastic flows are the most deadly. They are extremely fast-moving, deceptively so. The thick opaque billows that accompany a flo ..read more

By Allison Kubo Hutchison NASA announced on June 2 that it would send two missions to the hot house planet. Once again NASA made robots will vist the Venusian skies for the first time since the Magellen orbiter mission which ended in 1994. These missions come after renewed interest in Venus due to the hotly debated phosphine controversy which if true could be a biosignature. The two missions were selected as part of the Discovery Program after a competitive peer review against the other possible missions. The two lucky winners are the DAVINCI+ (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gas ..read more

By: Hannah Pell On 11 June 2021, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) released a report titled “The Race Against Time for Smarter Development.” This report consolidates a culmination of research over five years (2014-2018) on worldwide science policy trends and governance, centering on three key areas: research spending, digital technologies, and sustainability. UNESCO's conclusions offer answers to the question: are we using science to build the future we want? The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the necessity of global scientific cooperation and open ..read more

  By Aine Gallagher The day I attempted to give an inspirational team talk in Irish to a football team, was the most embarrassing day of my life. In Ireland, the Irish language is a minority language spoken by a small percentage of people. I have always loved but struggled to learn it and now, after an arduous 10-year journey, I speak it every day. Did I mention the word arduous? Joining this Irish-speaking team was the best thing I ever did because it immersed me in the language. In the beginning, it was awful! I was the one who stood on the sideline, feeling out of place, trying to jo ..read more

State Farm, Asteroid falling to Earth, CC BY 2.0 By Allison Kubo Hutchison Recently published in Science, research focusing on the plants, rather than the usual star of the show, dinosaurs, reveals new information about the evolution of rainforests. But don’t worry we will talk about dinosaurs later. In the field of paleobotany, the study of fossilized plants, studying rainforests was once thought to be impossible. The high amounts of decomposition aided by high biodiversity were thought to prevent fossilization. However, that isn’t quite true. The fossils exist, they are just supe ..read more