May 2012
38 posts
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
— Carl Sagan
Can Seth MacFarlane and Neil deGrasse Tyson rekindle our passion for science? →
io9.com
Fox is finally doing something right.
In Fall 2013, Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane will team up with Neil deGrasse Tyson in a bid to bring back COSMOS, the iconic television series written by Carl Sagan, his wife Ann Druyan, and astrophysicist Steven Soter. Druyan and Soter will co-produce with MacFarlane, and Tyson will be filling the shoes of Sagan as host of the series, which is scheduled to air on Fox.
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“She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
—Carl Sagan, Contact (via the-star-stuff)
NASA Will Begin Training a Team of Astronauts for a Manned Landing on an Asteroid →
geeks.thedailywh.at
The mission, which could take place within the next decade, would take humans farther from Earth than ever before — up to 3 million miles away. Mission objectives include collecting mineral samples and — no joke — determining how to destroy an asteroid in the unlikely event that it becomes a threat to the Earth.
“Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
How Big Is The Universe? →
htwins.net
This a great interactive tool that can show you how everything in the universe stacks up, from humans to atoms to Red Dwarfs.
