As the art director of information graphics at Scientific American, I’m charged with developing explanatory art for some pretty mind-blowing topics. Our team—text editor, expert author, artist, and me—often works toward illustrating a process or concept that has never been rendered before, or may have only been visualized for other specialists in the field in [...]

We’re counting down the days here until the Scientific American tweet-up at the American Museum of Natural History on Wednesday, January 18, starting at 6 p.m. Full details are on my earlier blog post. We’ll enjoy talks, a tour of the “Beyond Planet Earth” exhibition–and some conversations over cocktails. Attendance is free for followers of [...]

You say you’d love a fun science evening? Great, here’s your chance. Scientific American will be co-hosting a tweet-up and reception in partnership with the American Museum of Natural History the evening of Wednesday, January 18. While we expand our minds, we’ll enjoy some cocktails and open access to the Beyond Planet Earth exhibit. Attendance [...]

Today is International Women’s Day. To celebrate, here’s a post showcasing just a couple of the many really amazing discoveries made by women in astronomy. * Annie Maunder was born in Ireland in 1868. She won a scholarship to go to Cambridge, where she studied mathematics. She was top in her year, but did not [...]

Something unusual has been spotted lurking around several galaxies’ central black holes. Astronomers think it may be limiting the growth of the black holes – and stars elsewhere in the galaxies, too. Astronomers studying nearby galaxies have found a new type of outflow called an ultra-fast outflow, or UFO. An international team of astronomers led [...]

Fed up of simply reading about space and want to do some real science? Well, here’s your chance: astronomers are asking anyone with a pair of binoculars or telescope to train them on a new object visible in the night sky. The object is an asteroid called 433 Eros. At 20 miles wide it’s one [...]

They may come from completely different fields of study, but brain scans and supernovae have more in common than you would think. In a new TED talk, Michelle Borkin explains how software developed for use in a hospital was able to help astronomers study the structure of supernovae. An astronomer colleague of Borkin’s at the [...]

When a star becomes a white dwarf — an old, extremely dense star that would have once been similar to our own Sun — the eventful part of its life is over. It releases what heat and light it has left over billions of years, slowly cooling until it no longer shines. Usually. Some white [...]

How did the Christmas gamma-ray burst explode? No, it’s not a geeky Christmas cracker joke, it’s a real question scientists have been trying to answer since Christmas day last year, when a gamma-ray burst called GRB 101225A first lit up the sky. The Christmas burst, as its come to be known, exhibted some rather unusual [...]

This post in an updated version of one that appeared last year on the previous incarnation of this blog. Once again, by chance, I’m away from the bright lights of the city during a yearly event that is best witnessed in an area with little light pollution and a clear sky. Unfortunately, this year, the [...]

Invited Guest Post by Evelyn Lamb (@evelynjlamb) Later today the setting sun will align with Manhattan’s street grid to produce a striking phenomenon dubbed “Manhattanhenge.” Taking its name from the more famous Stonehenge in England, where the sun rises over the prominent Heel Stone on the summer solstice, Manhattanhenge happens twice a year, once about [...]

My family is gearing up for a big weekend of science in New York City. First, there’s the annual World Science Festival, which this year is bringing free activities like bug hunting, weather forecasting and marine ecology research to Brooklyn Bridge Park among many other locations. (Check the full slate of activities here.) Then, on Tuesday comes [...]

Last Thursday, my colleague John Matson described a truly amazing galaxy known, somewhat unromantically, as BX442. It has a majestic spiral pattern while hundreds of its galactic contemporaries were gawky and misshapen—a peculiar and special anomaly which suggests to many astronomers that cosmic pinwheels are ephemeral art forms, like Tibetan sand mandalas. John’s piece spurs [...]

At a lecture I went to some years ago, astrophysicist Trevor Weekes compared garden-variety elementary particles to mosquitoes. They are plentiful and easy to find—indeed, they find you. But ultra-high-energy gamma rays, he said, are like elephants. They are fairly rare, but among the greatest of creatures. They often roam in spectacular habitats. Their sheer [...]

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Last year, I shared my reflections on Ada herself. This year, I’d like to celebrate the day by pointing you to a book about another pioneering woman of science, Maria Mitchell. Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer among the American Romantics by Renée Bergland Boston: Beacon Press [...]

You may recall (as I and my offspring do) the controversy about six years ago around the demotion of Pluto. There seemed to me to be reasonable arguments on both sides, and indeed, my household included pro-Pluto partisans and partisans for a new, clear definition of “planet” that might end up leaving Pluto on the [...]

On 29th September this year, astronomers announced the discovery of an exoplanet called Gliese 581 g. This planet, they said, was exactly the right distance from its star for water to exist on its surface, with a good chance that it could hold an atmosphere. These two properties are very important when judging whether a [...]

A new video tours the nearby universe and makes it charmingly familiar. When I was a graduate student I spent a lot of time studying maps of our universe. These were being constructed using great surveys of galaxies. Each of these fuzzy specks was triangulated on the sky and located in depth by its apparent [...]

It happens every year around now, and this year should peak on May 5th at approximately 9pm EDT (in the wee hours of May 6th if you’re on GMT). Little pieces of material that once belonged to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet will zip into our atmosphere as meteors. The Eta Aquarids (so-called because the [...]

NASA’s Deep Impact probe has captured images of Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), as it moves past the orbital distance of Jupiter on what may be its first trip inwards to the Sun, and possibly a spectacular show. Comets are notoriously fickle beasts. Chunks of primordial rock, dust, and volatile ices that formed some 4.5 billion [...]

It’s been an exciting few days for exoplanetary science. A slew of refined statistical measurements of the abundance of other worlds have made it clearer than ever that our galaxy is crammed with planets. One in six stars should host at least one Earth-sized object in an orbit smaller than that of Mercury, implying that [...]

This post is the fourth in a series that accompanies the publication of my book ‘Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos’ (Scientific American/FSG). Ten years ago the universe was in trouble. Or rather, our puny human theories about the nature of all the stars and galaxies in [...]

This post is the third in a series that accompanies the upcoming publication of my book ‘Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos’ (Scientific American/FSG). In space it’s a good thing that you can’t hear black holes scream. Although some of the most incontrovertible evidence for the existence [...]

You may notice that today is the one year anniversary of the Scientific American blog network. You may also notice that across the blogs this morning is a shared theme; time for the readers to speak up. Inspired by the blogger Ed Yong, the Sci Am blogs are asking for your thoughts. Consider this an [...]

  This has been an extraordinary week for planets (moons), exoplanets, and astrobiology. I’m hard pushed to write properly about all these things but sometimes the sheer tidal mass of discoveries tells its own story.       And tidal masses is the first one up. This week new results from the Cassini mission around [...]

Are you sick of reading about the transit of Venus this year? Yes? Me too. But the fact is that when astrophysical objects move between us and something else, like the convenient blaze of a star, there is an extraordinary amount that can be learned. I won’t go far into the delights of a venusian [...]

Hot Jupiters are special beasts in the exoplanetary menagerie. These giant worlds orbit their parent stars incredibly tightly, sometimes zipping around in barely a day or two, and so close that they can disturb the stellar atmosphere itself – as well as throwing themselves at the mercy of gravitational tides and scorching radiation. They were [...]

In April 1963, at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Tucson, Ariz., Peter van de Kamp made what should have been a landmark announcement. By tracking the motion of a dim, nearby star across the night sky, he had uncovered an unseen object tugging ever so slightly on the star and perturbing its [...]

Cicadas aren’t the only scientific rarity expected this month. At the end of May three planets will be visible to the naked eye in one small area of the sky. The planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will form “the tightest gathering of three naked-eye planets that the world will see until 2026,” according to the [...]

Step out into the darkness a few hours after sunset. What do you see overhead? If you live in a relatively unpopulated part of the world, you might see the broad stripe of the Milky Way splashed against a backdrop of black sky punctuated by countless stars. If, on the other hand, you live in [...]

The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that has already discovered some of the most intriguing exoplanets known has abruptly lost the capacity to carry out its mission, NASA officials announced May 15. NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009, relies on an array of flywheels, or reaction-wheel assemblies, to stabilize the pointing of its telescope toward a [...]

Fifty years ago, in the journal Nature, astronomer Maarten Schmidt published a brief paper noting that a star-like object known as 3C 273 was simply too far away to be a star in the Milky Way. Schmidt, of the California Institute of Technology, concluded on the basis of spectroscopic observations that the object was most [...]

When NASA launched the WISE satellite in 2009, astronomers hoped it would be able to spot loads of cool, dim objects known as brown dwarfs. Bigger than a planet, a brown dwarf is not quite a star, either—it is too small to sustain the nuclear fusion reactions that turn hydrogen to helium. But it may [...]

“You have improved our lives in ways that are practical and inspirational,” said President Barack Obama. He saluted the top U.S. researchers with the highest honors bestowed by the U.S. government, the National Science and Technology Medals. At the White House ceremony on February 1, he honored 12 winners for the National Medals of Science [...]

A superluminous supernova may sound like a designation dreamed up by someone with a penchant for hyperbole, but such explosions are deserving of the extravagant language. They are very big blasts—and two newfound examples originated in the very distant past. Astronomers using two telescopes atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii have discovered a pair of supernovae [...]

As it flares out of the distant Oort Cloud, the newly discovered comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) appears to be heading on a trajectory that could make for one of the most spectacular night-sky events in living memory. Why is this comet expected to be so unique? Two reasons: Astronomers predict that the comet will pass [...]

The first morning lecture series for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting, which is focused on physics for this, its 62nd anniversary year, got off to a cosmic start, tracing the origins and evolution of the universe, before crashing back to Earth with a discussion of climate change. (You can read all our coverage this week, [...]

I was recently in Alaska as an invitee of GoPro cameras in support of a pretty cool science experiment by Project Aether. Briefly, I was there to assist as they launched weather balloons with GoPro cameras attached in order to collect intra-auroral images. After the weather balloons dropped, the GPS tagged cameras were then retrieved, [...]

Stephen Colbert is a smart science fan and often features great science book authors and scientists on his show, The Colbert Report. I also appreciate his funny takes on scientific topics such as tissue engineered meat, the LHC and more! Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson has appeared on The Colbert Report six times. What a boon [...]

Alex Wild over at Compound Eye is quick to point out with his Thrifty Thursday posts that great photos can be taken with relatively inexpensive equipment… IF you know what you’re doing. Here’s a great case in point: A few nights ago, I was strolling along a pedestrian mall in Boulder, CO with some friends. [...]

Almost five years ago to the day, Neil Shubin’s first book (and my first foray into illustrating popular non-fiction), Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body debuted. It was by all accounts hugely successful, far exceeding the publisher’s sales expectations in the first few months and going into multiple [...]

The Martian rovers Opportunity and Spirit have represented optimism, hope, and even cuteness to millions of people dreaming about discoveries on the red planet. How appropriate then, that the newest rover, Curiosity, should carry a sundial with sentiments and illustrations worthy of classic children’s literature. Curiosity blasted off aboard an Atlas 5 rocket on November [...]

Where are all the space-art bloggers?  When Symbiartic was in the planning stages, this was a post I knew I had to write. There are so few I found it at first surprising.  Do the images from the Hubble trump inspiration in painters?  Is interest in space waning compared to say, paleontology? Science inspired art [...]

By far the most common question I get when I tell people that I am a scientific illustrator is one variation (some more tactful than others) of, “They still use illustrators? Why don’t they just photograph everything?” In fact, it’s a great question. Although photography is fantastically impressive and can offer glimpses into worlds both [...]

  Links for the top five stories: Printing Pizza for Astronauts Magnetar Glitch Opportunity Breaks a Record Kepler’s Flywheel Woes A Galactic Collision

[The text below is a modified transcript of this video.] 5) Exoplanet Composition Scientists have determined the chemical composition of an exoplanet’s atmosphere–129 light years away. The planet is a gas giant five to ten times more massive than Jupiter and it lives in a solar system along with four other gassy planets. Using data [...]

Story 5 Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson helped DC comics locate Superman’s fictional home planet Krypton in the non-fictional universe.  Because Krypton revolves around a red sun, Tyson has placed the planet in the constellation Corvus, which has a red dwarf star. Links: Superman’s Home Planet Krypton “Found” Story 4 Many people living in New York [...]

Story 5 A team of Harvard-based astronomers have discovered two black holes cohabiting Messier 22, a globular cluster of stars. Links: Cluster Coexistence: Neighboring Black Holes Defy Predictions of Violent Interactions Story 4 A far-out scheme to mitigate global warming calls for tethering space dust to a near-earth asteroid. Links: Asteroid Dust Could Fight Climate [...]

Story 5 Chinese, European and Canadian scientists recently set distance records for quantum teleportation. Links: Quantum Teleportation Achieved Over Record Distances Physicists Spooked by Faster-Than-Light Information Transfer Quantum Entanglement – The Movie Story 4 The Mars Curiosity Rover receives a morning wake-up call from NASA engineers. Links: NASA Reveals Mars Rover’s Morning Mix Story 3 [...]

Last week (June 5, 2012), the lucky citizens of Earth were in just the right place to watch Venus’s transit across the face of the sun. While this occurred just eight years ago as well, it won’t happen again for more than a century. The next time any Earthling will be able to watch Venus [...]

It was a uniquely clear night in Los Angeles, so I thought I’d try to get a shot of the full moon. Taken March 8, 2012, at 11:06pm. Speaking of full moons, here’s a fun piece from the archives: Real Life Werewolves? Dog Bites and Full Moons

Mike Brown always wanted to discover a planet. On August 25, 2006, Mike Brown killed Pluto. Well, the truth is Pluto had been killed long before, but it wasn’t until August 25 that the International Astronomical Union met, in Prague, to have the official vote. And it wasn’t until August 25 that the press conference [...]

I couldn’t sit back and NOT see something that only comes through every 105 years. So I got off of my duff, drove down to Oklahoma City to the Oklahoma Science Museum to see the Transit of Venus It was nice crowd.  At first there were only 40 people or so, but by 5pm (my [...]

When Halley’s Comet last come around (the Earth) was so excited about it.  I was checking out books, making special folders and writing up my own reports of the celestial event.  I made plans to camp out on the front lawn – which was a shared common plaza because I lived in an apartment complex [...]