Russ McBee

NASA's Phoenix mission to the polar regions of Mars landed flawlessly this weekend. The mission's goal is to drill beneath the frozen surface and extract samples of ice and soil, which the lander can then subject to a battery of chemical tests. This is one more exciting mission in NASA's spectacular portfolio of robotic planetary exploration. The ...

Three very cool stories caught my eye today. 1) Researchers have managed to decipher and play back a recording made nearly two decades before Edison's phonograph. The phonautogram was made in France in 1860 and represents the earliest known recording of any sound. Although the recording (and others like it) have been known for a long time, only ...

At last year's TED conference, one of the presenters was Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Team on the Cassini mission to Saturn. Her presentation focused mainly on a tour of the discoveries regarding two of Saturn's most intriguing moons: Titan and Enceladus. For centuries, Titan had been a mystery, its surface completely shrouded in a ...

TED is always a site full of provocative ideas. This video clip shows how little we really understand about the undersea world; most of the clip relates to visual camouflage and bioluminescence as tools for attraction, conveying information, and defense. Check this out: The octopus camouflage at the end is jaw-dropping, and the squid ...

This is fascinating: According to a new simulation, electrically charged dust can organise itself into DNA-like double helixes that behave in many ways like living organisms, reproducing and passing on information to one another. Maybe this is how life first evolved. Like DNA, the dust spirals can store information. They do so in the ...

I haven't blogged much about Spirit and Opportunity, the two little Mars rovers that could, although I'm completely obsessed with them. They were only planned to last three months, yet they're still chugging along after three years. Practically every week, one of them returns yet more evidence that Mars was once covered in water. This week was ...

Partly as a replacement for the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA is currently designing the James Webb Space Telescope. If all goes well, it will launch in 2013. Although I personally think they should keep funding the Hubble as long as it can feasibly continue operating, NASA didn't ask for my opinion, so they plan to let the Hubble burn up ...