Miscellaneous

December 31, 2013

2013 in Review

Favorite Science News

Russian Meteor

No story from this past year  captured my attention and fascination like the meteor that fell in Chelyabinsk, Russia. On February 15, in the early morning sky, a 19-meter-long piece of rock from the outer reaches of the solar system came crashing into the early morning sky.  Let’s just take a look at some of the footage captured by numerous dash cams (on a side note–thanks to all the insurance-conscious Russians for installing dash cams!):

Not only was this falling meteor an absolute beautiful thing to watch, but meteors of this size are relatively rare and don’t usually land in a populated place. This was a wonderful scientific opportunity to study this event with numerous videos, GPS data, and real-time coverage via social media.

But the event was not over.

Continue Reading

August 22, 2013

Wake Up!

zzzzzz……zzzzsdsfhoi…wha?? Oh hi! I guess I must have dozed off for a few seconds. Wait, I’ve been sleeping since March?

Yes, blog, you’ve been asleep for a while. We’re going through some changes here at the Orders of Magnitude household. You may be a seeing a little less of Patricia Waldron, whose journalistic abilities will be taking her to the redwoods and beaches of Santa Cruz, CA. I’ll be in OKC for the time being, but now that things have settled down a bit, we’ll be able to get back into a regular blogging schedule. What have we missed? Probably not a lot, right?

https://i0.wp.com/science.nasa.gov/media/medialibrary/2013/07/23/splash.jpg

In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured Saturn’s rings and Earth in the same frame.

Aw, man!

Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano escaped what could have been a deadly disaster on July 16, 2013 when his spacesuit began leaking water. He described not being able to breathe and barely made it back into the ISS.

Holy water balls!

An August 5th story in The Telegraph says that having an orgasm instead of doing a crossword puzzle is better for your brain. What if you’re doing a crossword AND having sex? I guess that would make the sex not as good…anyway, I think we all know what we need to do here.

Never fear! Just because we haven’t been posting doesn’t mean we haven’t been paying attention to all the awesome science.  Stay tuned, Magnituders. We’re just getting started.