Movies that deal with the Armageddon caused by the impact of a meteorite on earth have the great advantage that they can almost completely define the scenario – until now almost no references exist how such an event would occur in reality. Large impacts were relatively rare in historic times; the most famous (and still [...]

In 1849 the Italian chemist J. Usiglio performed a set of evaporation experiments with seawater along the French Riviera and established the order in which evaporite minerals precipitate from an aqueous environment. On earth these minerals are mostly gypsum and halite, associated  with borates, potassium and magnesium salts. These minerals (not surprisingly) if found in [...]

“No one with an eye for land forms can cross eastern Washington in daylight without encountering and being impressed by the “scabland.” Like great scars marring the otherwise fair face to the plateau are these elongated tracts of bare, black rock carved into mazes of buttes and canyons. Everybody on the plateau knows scabland…[]…The popular [...]

Ash: “You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? …. Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” Lambert: “You admire it.” Ash: “I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” “Alien” 1979 One of the first (fictive) depictions of Martians was published in [...]

“Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.” “A Dream Within a Dream” (1849) by Edgar Allan Poe Mars – a distant, extraterrestrial world, but [...]