Skeptophilia

The list of confirmed exoplanets now exceeds six thousand.  Considering the fact that the three main ways they're detected -- direct 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...

One of the most unusual stories that H. P. Lovecraft ever wrote is "In the Walls of Eryx."  It isn't his usual fare of soul-su...

At the last Tompkins County Friends of the Library Used Book Sale, I picked up a copy of Donald Yeomans's fascinating book titled Near-E...

There's a general pattern you see in astrophysics, which arises from the fact that gravity is both (1) always attractive, never repulsiv...

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 ...

By anyone's standards, Jupiter's moon Io is a strange place.  It is by far the most geologically-active body in the Solar System, w...

You never hear people talking about the planet Neptune much. The other planets are all famous for something or another.  Mercury is the clos...

For a lot of people, the most disquieting thing about science is the way it's moved humanity farther and farther from its position as th...

It's interesting how the approach to science has changed in the last four centuries. It's easy to have the (mistaken) impression tha...

One of the main things that separates scientists from the rest of us is that they notice things we would just take for granted. Gregor Men...