Cassini will terminate its 20-odd-years-long mission in September. But it’s determined to go out with a bang. In yesterday’s press conference, NASA announced that the probe, during a 2015 flyby of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, found clues that the ocean within the icy moon has almost all we think it needs to spark life. Continue reading “Enceladus: a song of ice and tides”
It’s not all about location: planets need a lot of things to go right to harbor life. Continue reading What makes a planet habitable
Capillarity is a staple of school physics. But are you sure you know how it works? And what do dragons have to do with it? Continue reading The thirsty dragon and other capillarity magic
I grew up in a famously foggy place. Usually, it’s just a nuisance, but if you know how it works, at least you can add a little poetry to it. The first thing you need to know is that warm air keeps moisture better than colder one. Which is to say, water remains a vapor more easily in warm air. When a mass of warm … Continue reading A very foggy title
No Christmas landscape is complete without snow. Lots of snow. And every little snowflake is unique, everyone knows that! How come, tho? Snow is nothing else than teeny tiny ice crystals that form in the clouds and stay solid all the way down to the ground. Water crystallizes around microscopic imperfections, like dust particles floating in the clouds. Once the initial nucleus is formed, the … Continue reading Every snowflake is unique
In the cold of Canada, a man blows a soap bubble, which immediately freezes. Since that’s awesome, the guy makes a nice video about it. Who knows, maybe he even knew about all the physics that was going on in front of his camera. Let’s start from the easiest thing: why does the bottom of the bubble freeze last? The answer is gravity: the outermost … Continue reading Frozen bubbles
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