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Rings with discreet dual purpose have been in use since before the common era, when Hannibal, facing extradition, allegedly ingested the poison he kept secreted behind a gemstone on his finger. (More recently, poison rings gave rise to a popular Game of Thrones fan theory…) Victorians prevented their most closely kept secrets—illicit love letters, perhaps? Last wills and testaments?—from falling […] A 400-Year-Old Ring that Unfolds to Track the...

If you want to learn how the planets move, you’ll almost certainly go to one place first: Youtube. Yes, there have been plenty of worthwhile books written on the subject, and reading them will prove essential to further deepening your understanding. But videos have the capacity of motion, an undeniable benefit when motion itself is […] A 16th-Century Astronomy Book Featured “Analog Computers” to...

Much of the world got to know Carl Sagan through Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the thirteen-part PBS series on the nature of the universe — and the intensity of Sagan's own passion to discover that nature. First aired in 1980, it would become the most widely watched series in the history of American public television. […] Watch a Young Carl Sagan Appear in His...

The point at which we date the birth of any genre is apt to shift depending on how we define it. When did science fiction begin? Many cite early masters of the form like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells as its progenitors. Others reach back to Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein as the genesis of the […] When Astronomer Johannes Kepler Wrote the First Work...

Willem Janszoon Blaeu Celestial Globe 1602 No matter how accustomed we've grown over the centuries to flat maps of the world, they can never be perfectly accurate. Strictly speaking, no map can perfectly capture the territory it describes (an impossibility memorably fictionalized by Jorge Luis Borges in "On Exactitude in Science"), but there's a reason […] 3D Interactive Globes Now Online: Spin Through an...

The smallest asteroid measures 4.1 meters in diameter; the largest 939 kilometers, or 580 miles. Created by 3D animator Alvaro Gracia Montoya, the data on asteroid sizes was all gleaned from Wikipedia... via Laughing Squid The Size of Asteroids Compared to New York City is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And...

Name all the things in space in 20 minutes? Impossible, you say? Well if there’s anyone who might come close to summarizing the contents of the universe in less than half an hour, with the aid of a handy infographic map also available as a poster, it's physicist Dominic Walliman, who has explored other vast […] An Illustrated Map of Every Known Object in...

Many of us have heard of Stephen Hawking but know him only as a symbol of a powerful mind dedicated for a lifetime to the thorniest problems in astrophysics. Even more of us have heard of black holes but know of them only as those dangerous things in sci-fi movies that suck in spaceships. But […] Stephen Hawking’s Black Hole Paradox Explained in Animation...

Sixty years ago, mankind got its very first glimpse of the far side of the Moon, so called because it faces away from the Earth. (And as astronomers like Neil DeGrasse Tyson have long taken pains to point out to Pink Floyd fans, it isn't "dark.") Taken by the Soviet Union, that first photo may […] The Very First Picture of the Far Side...

It’s hard to imagine that the space-crazed general public needed any help getting worked up about astronauts and NASA in the early 60s. Perhaps the wild popularity of space-related imagery is in part what motivated NASA administrator James Webb to create the NASA Art Program in 1962. Although the program's handpicked artists weren’t edited or censored in any way, […] NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Leibovitz, Norman Rockwell...

Photo by ESO/G. Huedepohl, via Wikimedia Commons Queen couldn't possibly have been Queen without Freddie Mercury, nor could it have been Queen without Brian May. Thanks not least to the recent biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, the band's already larger-than-life lead singer has become even larger still. But its guitarist, despite the film's surface treatment of his character, […] Queen Guitarist Brian May Is Also an Astrophysicist:...