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A week in space: Dragon docks, dark matter doesn't not exist (maybe), and the many ways you could have seen the eclipse

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


The Dragon spacecraft finally set off to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning. On Friday, Dragon docked with the ISS and NASA streamed it live. If you want to relive the disappointment/excitement take a look at the NASA coverage.

In the run up to the launch, WIRED had a series of Q&As with experts in space history, policy and law, which are also worth a look.

A paper recently appeared on arXiv.org arguing that there are flaws in a study that claimed there was no dark matter where there should be near our solar system. Particle physics blog Résonaances has the story (not for the faint hearted, but worth a read if you're really interested):


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As can be seen in the plot, correcting the wrong assumption leads to a perfect consistency between the data and the predictions assuming the presence of dark matter. pwned.

Jon Butterworth at the Guardian also wrote about the new paper.

The Square Kilometer Array telescope goes to... Australia and South Africa.

The best way to watch the solar eclipse. Or see it from space. And of course, APOD has a more usual, but still pretty amazing, view of the event.

The transit of Venus is nearly here.

Anything I've missed?

Kelly Oakes has a master's degree in science communication and a degree in physics, both from Imperial College London. She started this blog so she could share some amazing stories about space, astrophysics, particle physics and more with other people, and partly so she could explore those stories herself.

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