Science is a cooperative enterprise spanning the generations. It's the passing of a torch from teacher to student to teacher. A community of minds, reaching back to antiquity and forward to the stars.

If you look at the history of unexplained phenomena that was first explained by spiritual, mystical forces, the track record is not very good for the mystical, magical explanations to survive against more quote "mundane" physical explanations.

But my vote for Venus's most peculiar feature is the presence of craters that are all relatively young and uniformly distributed over its surface. This innocuous-sounding feature implicates a single planetwide catastrophe that reset the cratering clock... turning Venus's entire surface into the American automotive dream-a totally paved planet.

When provoked, the itsy-bitsy invertebrates known as tardigrades can suspend their metabolism. In that state, they can survive temperatures of... 73 K for days on end, making them hardy enough to endure being stranded on Neptune. So the next time you need space travelers with the right stuff, you might want to choose yeast and tardigrades, and leave your astronauts, cosmonauts, and taikonauts at home.

All tweets are tasty. Any tweet anybody writes is tasty. So, I try to have each tweet not simply be informative, but have some outlook, some perspective that you might not otherwise had.

Dark matter and dark energy are two things we measure in the universe that are making things happen, and we have no idea what the cause is.

The Big Bang Theory: When geeky scientists can be main characters in a hit prime time series, you know there's hope for the world.