REAL TO REEL
This not a warning of an impending asteroid impact, nor is it confusion about the nature of comet 67P—this is a tale about an asteroid and a duck. But not any old duck, rather one particular auld Pekin duck: the absurdly wealthy and characteristically cranky adventure capitalist Scrooge McDuck, the character created by Carl Barks …
From the opening moments of Goliath Season 4, the legal drama starring Billy Bob Thornton that never abides by the rules, one thing is clear: ever notice how something you've anticipated is nothing like you expected when it arrives? What is clear from previous seasons is that while the legal content is about tort, most …
Like the captain of the Rocinante, I never skip my morning coffee—and The Expanse title sequence is like a shot of espresso. It might seem as though the protocol for dealing with the one minute interruption and seemingly unintelligible theme song is to hit Skip Intro…but it just seems that way (as someone in another …
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"The whole world will weep with gratitude when the big day comes because Mr Happer has got his comet!" What Mr Happer really wants is to find a comet. If he does, he'll call it a Happer comet or Happer's Comet or…Comet Happer. Sadly, Happer never gets his comet but he does eventually get an …
When I first watched The Expanse, I did not get on board right away. The science bits sounded good, but like a Belter from Ceres trying to survive Earth’s gravity, trying to understand the interconnections in The Expanse was literally crushing me. I needed to find my Rosetta Stone…and not just for the dialects. To kang showxa im …
The opening ceremony of Tokyo 2020 made a massive impact when seemingly out of nowhere a rogue planet appeared in the sky over the Olympic stadium. A shimmering ring gate made of hundreds of drones had morphed into a slowly rotating Earth, like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. In tribute to the drone-made …
On 23 July 2021, the world watched as the long overdue and somewhat subdued opening ceremony of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games got underway in Japan — and while not the greatest show on Earth this year, it certainly delivered the greatest Earth on show, for it was the day the Earth appeared over Tokyo. …
On 11 July, 2021, Sir Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, took a suborbital flight to the inner edge of outer space, reaching an altitude of 86 km (54 miles) above the surface of the Earth. Although it marked a milestone for space tourism, where that milestone marker should be placed is an ongoing matter …
Mr Benn may have good reason to dress up in costume this year, because 2021 marks 50 years since the bowler-hatted British businessman's adventures in a fancy-dress shop first aired on TV in 1971. The now celebrated antics of Mr Benn were first introduced in a series of children's books in 1967, followed by an …
From titanium, helium-3 and sapphire, to pergium, tylium and opus, whether nudging an asteroid too close to Earth, cloning lunar miners to save costs, or mining the outer reaches of the Solar System, here are some movies and TV shows about mining in space. This list is presented in no particular order and the results …
Having been treated to an uncharacteristic flurry of snow during a February cold snap in London, made worse by the sedentary lifestyle imposed by the coronavirus lockdown, I was looking forward to opening the door into spring. Instead, I chanced upon the trailer for The Door into Summer, the first ever film adaptation of the …
Feeling somewhat frustrated during UK lockdown 3.0, I picked up Robert Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, to read again. In the Intermission, Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long, Heinlein's character sets out a list of skills of the competent man — what he thinks a human being should be able to do. If I …
NASA and Arizona State University, along with other partners, are working on a project to send a spacecraft to investigate the unique asteroid 16 Psyche, an assumed metal-rich body about the size of Switzerland orbiting in the asteroid belt at an average distance of 2.9 AU from the Sun. What is unique about asteroid Psyche …
A useful graphic showing the largest objects in the asteroid belt — the first 22 objects in decreasing size from dwarf planet 1 Ceres to 7 Iris ...
Inspired by five words, or is it six, in the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon, a movie about an asteroid the size of Texas on course to impact Earth in eighteen days and the team of deep core drillers sent to break it up, I wondered whether there were any quantifiable clues to support the statement that …
In 2020, Amazon announced that its legal drama Goliath starring Billy Bob Thornton as troubled lawyer Billy McBride had been renewed for one final season, then coronavirus arrived. This article was written to fill the void while we waited through the pandemic for Season 4 to arrive. It provides a recap (precap) of what you …
Compiling a list of every asteroid and comet disaster movie ever made is no easy feat. First, you need to identify potential candidates. Then you have to watch them all, which can be somewhat harder than finding them. Much like asteroids and comets themselves, there's a whole spectrum of content in these dramas, from the …
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Apparently, if you smell a fresh meteorite it smells like sulphur, according to reports about the Tagish Lake meteorite and the aroma that filled the air during its fall in 2000. And the Aguas Zarcas meteorite that fell in Costa Rica in 2019 has been said to smell of compost, vanilla and Brussels sprouts, depending …
Graphics showing all of the asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft...
From active asteroids to dormant comets, rubble piles to remnant cores, main belt comets and manx comets to ambiguous interstellar objects, this article provides a brief overview of the smaller objects in our planetary zoo—the main differences and similarities between asteroids and comets. But if it's meteors you're looking for, read Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites. …
Having watched all five seasons of the Amazon police drama Bosch, I was excited to find Season 6 arrive during the lockdown imposed on us due to the coronavirus pandemic. Ten minutes into the first episode and Bosch is called out to the Overlook at Lake Hollywood Park on a murder case. An abandoned 911 …
The Walkie-Talkie building is a skyscraper in the City of London, located at 20 Fenchurch Street. It switched on its lights in 2014 — and has been messing with sunlight ever since. The building sits slightly away from the main cluster of the city's skyscrapers as if banished, poking up out of a group of …
It's the end of the year and one particular tabloid newspaper is again warning us that it could soon be the end of the world — yes, asteroid 2019 AE3 is in our vicinity and the apocalypse is coming. In keeping with the tabloid drama, below is a link to a list of all the …
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Amazon TV's Goliath is back for a third instalment and after the two previous diverse offerings, no-one knew what to expect in Season 3. When Billy McBride in Season 1 said, “Ever since I took this case, weird shit is happening to me…”, well, that kind of weird has nothing on this. In 2016, we …
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So there's another apocalyptic asteroid warning in the tabloid news headlines. The lead scaremongerer in the UK is the Daily Express, who started out playfully alerting us to asteroids that will skim by Earth in the coming days. It didn't take long for a war of the digital world to start warning of swarms of …
I once read a quote in a conference abstract that stated the paper had been written to serve as “a historical guide to the asteroid literature for the perplexed”. That quote aptly sums up my desire for writing a piece on the history of asteroid classification and taxonomies, and the schemes currently in use. When …
More than 100 years have passed since the first film was shown in movie theatres that depicted a rock from space wreaking havoc on Earth—although in that case it was a comet rather than an asteroid making an impact. That movie, a silent black and white film called The End of the World released in …
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Many people will remember the day in 2013 when one asteroid stole the limelight from another. On 15 February 2013, all eyes of astronomers were on the close approach of a 30 metre-sized Apollo asteroid 367943 Duende (then known as 2012 DA14). The asteroid was not expected to be visible to the naked eye. Nor …
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It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a moviemaker with a large rock heading for Earth must ignore the laws of physics and make things behave the way moviegoers want, otherwise no-one will watch it. And so asteroids and comets are called meteors, and meteoroids and meteors are called meteorites, and meteorites are called...well…meteorites, actually. The …
When Season 2 of Amazon's gritty TV series Goliath was released, some viewers were at a loss—a different type of loss to some of the characters. Some viewers were gripped, while others were up in arms, while some of the characters were unable to hold onto theirs. Once I was able to uncover my eyes …
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