The Crab Nebula may help seed the cosmos with dust. Click image for more
There's a lot of propaganda passed off as science, endless parades of pseudoscience, and just plain bad science on TV. But there's some good stuff, too. This week, Joe Romm at
Climate Progress writes about some Emmy-
nominated science:
“COSMOS: A SpaceTime Odyssey,” is the Fox network’s gorgeous, high-tech update of the classic PBS series, with the redoubtable Neil deGrasse Tyson in the narrator role made famous by Carl Sagan. It is one of the strongest defenses of science and the scientific method ever to appear on network TV — and Tyson was not shy in speaking out about the reality of climate science.
“Years Of Living Dangerously” is the first documentary series devoted to climate change ever to appear on a major network or premium cable. Its 9 episodes were produced by the legendary storytellers and filmmakers James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Jerry Weintraub — together with three former 60 Minutes producers who already have 18 Emmys between them.
- Voyager transmits more evidence it has left the protective cocoon of the solar helio-pause and entered a region of interstellar space dominated by waves/particles zipping through the sparse, thin dust and gas that abounds in our galaxy.
- Cool interactive map shows how hot your local region might be in the year 2100.
- Take time to look up tonight, weather permitting: there's a supermoon tonight and another next month on Aug 10.
- Bummer!
- A name like Reason gave us high hopes, but the publication turned into a den of libertarian fantasies. Here Jonathon Chait takes us through the documented process of anti-Obamacare writer posting as access to Medical Science marches along.
- The ultimate solar energy machines might have something to teach us after all:
In the pursuit of a renewable energy source, scientists have been trying to understand the exact mechanism behind photosynthesis, and now a large team of scientists has successfully captured the detailed “snapshots” of the process using a powerful laser, according to a report in Nature Communications.