National Train Day is coming up this weekend, so we'll take a look at a railroad that doesn't get a lot of attention, the one NASA has used to move parts and supplies to and from Kennedy Space Center. Plus: today in 1806, the birthday of James Shields, the only person who's served as US Senator from three different states.
Today in 1965 the launch of what is the oldest functioning object in Earth orbit, Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1. To say it's "functioning" might be overstating things, since all it does it sit up there, but it's still had a big impact on science.
The University of Cambridge did a study about robotic wellbeing coaches. And it turns out that if we want robots to help us help ourselves… they need to be cute.
For National Hispanic Heritage Month, here's the story of the first Hispanic woman in space, Ellen Ochoa, talented and versatile even by astronaut standards. Plus: an art student in China breaks stuff for art's sake, through a very peculiar vending machine.
If you're an astronaut, way up there in space, chances are you started the day with a song. Why? It's a NASA tradition. Plus: an artist in California has turned "Star Trek" into a widescreen format, so it fits on modern TVs.
Today in 1969 was the first day off for the Apollo 11 astronauts in more than a month. Yes, they'd finished their moon landing weeks earlier, but they had to go into quarantine in case they'd picked up some "moon germs" that could lead to a plague on Earth. (Fortunately, they hadn't.) Plus: there's a new augmented reality tour of a church in Florence, Italy that was deconstructed in 1784.
Sometimes you go into space to land on the moon, and other times it’s for maintenance purposes. NASA is planning a mission to replace the toilet on the International Space Station. Plus: this is Waste and Recycling Workers Week, are you paying tribute to those who collect all the stuff we toss out?
Like people in other industries who have the means to do so, the scientists who operate the Curiosity Rover are working away from their office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California. Though technically when you run a craft that's on another planet, you're always working remotely. Plus: artist Greg Olijnyk makes intricate sculptures of robots, telescopes, ships and more out of plain old cardboard.
NASA has fixed a problem with its Mars lander, essentially by telling the lander to use a robotic arm to help itself - or, depending on the headlines you read, to whack itself. Plus: a Wisconsin man finds a clever way to share a beer with his neighbor in the era of social distancing.
Russo loves to make up dirty acronyms. And now he's working for NASA, where basically everything is an acronym. Houston, we have a problem.
