Building blocks of life from space
We spend crores of rupees trying to go to the Moon and other planets and bring back rocks. But nature is bountiful, even lugging space debris to our door step free of cost. Read more
Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini | Categories: Geoscience, Space
We spend crores of rupees trying to go to the Moon and other planets and bring back rocks. But nature is bountiful, even lugging space debris to our door step free of cost. Read more
Posted by Subhra Priyadarshini | Categories: Careers, Space
Physicist Moumita Dutta from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, was part of the team that put a probe into Mars orbit in 2014. In an interview with Elizabeth Gibney, a senior reporter for Nature based in London, she talks about the lure of optics, the challenge of crafting super-light sensors, and the rise in Indian women entering space science. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Design, Ecology, Publishing, Space
There’s something about a collection. We seem to harbour an urge to amass and sort as we build menageries, museums, taxonomies. And the illustrated book is a portable simulacrum, a paper cabinet of curiosities, curated for maximum aesthetic punch. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Lab life, Space, Technology
A physicist at the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Space Applications Centre, Moumita Dutta was part of the team that put a probe into Mars orbit in 2014. The instruments they designed for the Mangalyaan are still beaming back data. Now India is gearing up for its third planetary mission in 2018 — Chandrayaan-2, a return to the Moon. As Dutta prepares to take part in the London Science Museum’s Illuminating India events, she talks about the lure of optics, the challenge of crafting super-light sensors, and the rise in Indian women entering space science. … Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Astrophysics, Lab life, Society, Space
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Ecology, Space, Technology
For centuries, the only way to ‘see’ Earth whole was through globes and maps; its grandeur was merely glimpsed in mountain vistas or across a stretch of ocean. That changed in the 1940s, when the first images of the planet were snapped from rockets probing the border of space, 100 kilometres up. The imaginable became the visible. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Arts, Genetics, Publishing, Space
What makes a science tome so audacious, original and right that it kickstarts a life’s journey, propelling someone to the bench or field? Science writer Ann Finkbeiner (of The Last Word on Nothing) has written about that for A View from the Bridge. And when Academic Book Week fired up on 23 January, I started musing anew about encounters with remarkable books. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Computer science, History of science, Space
High-profile protests dominated the media during the civil rights era in 1960s America. At NASA, a quieter struggle was already underway. From the 1940s, African-American women had been chipping away at perceptions and making incursions into the early space programme — that otherwise very white, male world. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Ecology, Social sciences, Space
This was a year that made waves — some so steep that I found myself reaching for a psychological surfboard. I skimmed along the discovery of gravitational waves (featured in Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Songs of Outer Space), and rode the CRISPR tsunami. The political turbulence stateside, in Britain and beyond had me scrabbling for balance — and historical precedents. Yet amid all the Sturm und Drang, it has been a terrific year for science and culture. Read more
Posted by Barbara Kiser | Categories: Design, Planetary sciences, Space, Technology
A big red igloo with a towering antenna seems a little overblown for a London show home. And so it proves. The object squatting outside the Royal Observatory Greenwich is actually a life-sized mock-up of a Mars habitat, billed as the imaginary dwelling of a second wave of settlers from Earth. That is, those who might live on the Red Planet in their thousands by around 2037, if the ambitious plans of space entrepreneurs such as SpaceX’s Elon Musk bear fruit. Read more