So today is the Winter Solstice and the days will finally start getting longer. I'm hoping that this is the reason behind me being so sleepy and tired all the time. This and the weather change. The season started with pouring rain and the beginning of heatwave (for winter). It's 10 pm and it's still 16oC (60F) outside and it's only going to get ( Read more... )

Syfy has put the first episode of The Expanse TV series online. You can watch it through almost anything - Hulu, Amazon, iTunes, Syfy's own website etc. Below is youtube version (most likely geolocked - sorry - I'm sure you can find it somewhere)

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I saw The Martian today. It was great. Just like with Gravity it shows science and space travel as something gripping but unlike Gravity it's all positive. Gravity's message was stay home. This says no matter the odds we can do it and get there if we put our minds in it. It's all for the space travel and exploration. The best advertisement for ( Read more... )

The biggest news today is free flowing water on Mars. Google has a doodle already. And it's been on all the websites and news and late night shows. In perfect timing all of those also run the commercials for The Martian. It's almost as if that movie PR planned it for the marketing campaign.

It was suspected before with a photos that looked like a ( Read more... )

So the autumn is almost here and the temperatures dropped and the fall TV is slowly starting. I'm watching The Bastard Executioner and I feel like I'm an oracle as I know what will happen long before it does. Just like that witch. Or maybe it's just so full of clichés that one simply knows what will happen next. [Spoiler (click to open)]The whole thing with the evil baron ( Read more... )

The biggest event this summer was the New Horizons flyby Pluto. I never managed to get myself to write about it but I was watching all the photos and reading all about it. And get very excited. But the best is still to come. Because of the speed the New Horizons needed to achieve - fastest thing we ever sent - it was so tiny it could only look at ( Read more... )

So I'm back in US after two extra hours spent in Toronto due to storm delays. Poland was beautiful as this is the time of year when everything is blooming (I went from lilacs and lily of the valley through the whole azalea and rhododendron blooming season all the way to pseudoacacia) and the weather was behaving perfectly. I got new visa. I met ( Read more... )

On May 20 Planetary Society is sending the first test solar sail into Earth's orbit. You can watch the launch here tomorrow.

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This first one is destined to burn in the atmosphere but this is the prototype for a actual launch next year. But they still need to secure additional founding so they have their own Kickstarter. They already almost 3x ( Read more... )

It's May the Fourth so of course a lot of Star Wars so we finally got to meet the bad guys. The photos of Gwendoline Christie, Lupita Nyong’o and Adam Driver's characters have been released. Or at least Driver's character without mask for the first time. Lupita's character seems to be all CGI as she is just there in the motion capture gear (but she ( Read more... )

Remember that "impossible" drive that everyone agreed cannot work but few labs made it work? Sceptics said that it wasn't really working. That thrust was just natural thermal convection currents arising from microwave heating or some other environmental conditions external to the drive. So NASA used it in vacuum and it still works. The physicist ( Read more... )