Skeptophilia

I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos  first aired. It was back in 1980, and I still remember being blown away by it all -- the me...

If I had to pick my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , the clear winner would be "The Inner Light."  Some classi...

The more exoplanets we find, the more they challenge our notion of how planets should be. For the many of us who grew up watching Star Trek ...

As much as I love the movie Contact , trying to find extraterrestrial life isn't just a matter of tuning in to the right radio frequency...

Today's topic in Skeptophilia isn't controversial so much as it is amazing.  And shows us once again what a weird, endlessly fascin...

Water is one of those things that seems ordinary until you start looking into it. The subject always puts me in mind of the deeply poignant ...

A couple of posts ago I mentioned how there have been discoveries of exoplanetary systems that have challenged our understanding of how plan...

Astrophysicists have a fairly clear idea about how planetary systems form. The whole thing starts with a nebula -- a cloud of interstellar g...

Dear Readers: After today's post, I'm going to be taking a long-overdue break from Skeptophilia .  My intent -- lord willin' an...

The Moon orbits the Earth in such a way that the same side always faces us.  Put another way, its periods of revolution and rotation are the...