Articles

Stardust Gallery manufactured LED lighted Lightbox Review by Eric Todd The owner of Stardust Gallery, Craig, was looking for volunteers to review an LED backlit lightbox containing either a Hubble image or an image of user choice. Since I had what I felt were fairly decent Milky Way images acquired from a session at a dark sky site late last Fall, I thought one of the somewhat processed images might be a good candidate to display inside one of the Stardust Gallery backlit lightboxes, and eagerly forwarded the image to the website. Within a few days, I was informed of shipment and received the lightbox a short time later. The first thing I noticed was the packaging- a heavy, frame like cardboard box that is just slightly larger than the lightbox. Inside, the lightbox itself was carefully bubble wrapped to provide both protection and add rigidity to the assembly. In addition, I unwrapped a small wall transformer with a plug that matched a similar plug to a cord emanating from the b...

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In less than two years, the New Horizons space probe is going to go whizzing by an object a billion miles further away from us than Pluto at speeds of up to 30,000 miles per hour. We know generally where that object—MU69, a cold dark object in the Kuiper Belt—will be thanks to telescope observations, otherwise we wouldn't be able to rendezvous with it at all, but like a blind date, we're not 100 percent sure what to expect. Details like the shape, exact size, color of the object and even if it has close neighbors all remain elusive. Last month, NASA researchers got a tantalizing glimpse of their next big destination when it passed between telescopes on Earth and the light of a distant star. But it has taken time to resolve that data into clues. Now, NASA has released two new illustrations of what MU69 might look like based on that data. They think that overall the object is likely about 20 miles long, but its observed shape raises even more...

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PayPal billionaire and Gawker war-wager Peter Thiel has invested $100,000 in a research effort to resurrect the woolly mammoth. Thiel, who believes that viewing death as inevitable is a sign of “complacency of the western world”, gave the money to Harvard University genomics professor George Church, whose laboratory is attempting to revive the extinct pachyderm. The donation, detailed for the first time in a new book by Ben Mezrich called Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History’s Most Iconic Extinct Creatures, was made in 2015. The de-extinction approach taken by Church and his team will sound familiar to Jurassic Park fans: they are taking DNA extracted from frozen mammoths and using it to genetically modify elephant cells. So far, according to the book, the team has managed to get mammoth fur to grow from the side of a mouse grafted with some elephant cells. The results have yet to be published in any scientific papers. Peter...

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