A few days ago, NASA released this lovely composite image of our home planet: It’s a spectacular image. Click to view in full resolution! But the projection is slightly…unusual. Can you pick why this isn’t what the earth would look like if you were viewing it from, say, the moon?

I’ve never really appreciated how lucky I am to have grown up with the blue marble. A poster of the earth floating in an endless black sea decorated the walls of my science classrooms since I was in elementary school. Even if it wasn’t spoken regularly, that image ensured that I knew the duality of [...]

The surface of Earth is being reshaped constantly. Mountainous uplands are broken down by water and wind producing sediment that is moved by rivers to lowlands. Some of this sediment is deposited along the way, some is delivered to the coast and continental shelf, and some makes its way to the ultimate sink, the deep [...]

Sitting here in New York after a night of listening to the roar of hurricane Sandy I, along with everyone else here, am feeling a little bit worn. And I’m lucky, many people are still in the midst of dealing with a very real disaster in the city and the states up and down the [...]

Planets in habitable zones, planets orbiting twin suns, miniature solar systems, rogue planets, planets, planets, planets. If there is one single piece of information you should take away from the recent flood of incredible exoplanetary discoveries it is this: Our universe makes planets with extraordinary efficiency – if planets can form somewhere, they will. We’ve [...]

As our spinning globe of rock and metal tracks its steady path around the Sun, we find ourselves crossing once again through the winter solstice, the point at which Earth’s northern pole is pointed as far from our fierce stellar parent as it can be (this year at a coordinated universal time of 5.30 am [...]

More people in India have access to cellphones than to basic sanitation. Meanwhile, more than 7,000 villages in the northwestern part of the country suffer drinking water shortages as the water table in this breadbasket region continues to drop. And the same story can be told all over the world, according to participants of a [...]

Two provocative ways to see long-term changes on earth are currently being promoted in honor of Earth Week. A Web site by NASA, and an app from HarperCollins, both show striking side-by-side satellite images of locations that have changed dramatically over time spans of up to 30 years or more. The primary intent is to [...]

In Raleigh, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has been building its Nature Research Center, a brand new extension to the museum focusing not just on science but on how science is done. It’s all awesome, and it opens today, April 20. You could talk all day about it — and, full disclosure, as [...]

An open letter to the knuckleheads at the International Telecommunication Union: Dear Knuckleheads: I’m hearing that you guys are considering dropping the Leap Second – the second added every year or so to Coordinated Universal Time to make sure CUT, kept by incredibly accurate and complex atomic clocks, squares as closely as possible with astronomical [...]