Sure, NASA is a government agency, but can you think of any other agency with the power to inspire a nation? That’s the gist of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s presentation at the University of New York at Buffalo on March 31st, certainly worth watching.

Click to see the whole sketch (©xkcd) I love today’s XKCD comic. It depicts Sagan-Man, a superhero who possesses Carl Sagan’s ability to communicate science to the world. In this case Sagan-Man uses his inspirational tone to stop a thief in the act. Unfortunately, I was too young to...

Although I’ve been neck-deep in Ares I-X launch news today, I’ve had some time to see what else has been going on in the Universe. I really hope I’ll find the time to get to this stack of blog post ideas over the weekend, one of them is a particular peach. But before I turn in for the...

In agreement with Phil Plait, this video made me smile too. A lot. President Obama (now a Nobel Peace Prize recipient) hosted an astronomical party on the White House lawn on October 7th for an audience of 150 middle school students from the Washington area and some guests of honour (including Charlie...

Go to a music festival. Get drunk. Dance like a crazy person. Fall over. Get muddy. Eat rubbish. Pass out. Wake up in a tent with a naked stranger. More drinking, dancing and merriment. Go home. Then try to work out how the hell you understand superstring theory and the mating rituals of the Arctic...

Of course, 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and half-way through this important year, we’ve seen some amazing feats of science. We’ve been fixing telescopes in orbit, assembling space stations, peering deep into the cosmos with a vast suite of telescopes, we’ve acquired...

In an article written by Don Reisinger for CNET News, Astroengine.com was selected as one of the “18 cool sites and apps that teach you about space.” This is awesome as one of my main effort on Astroengine is to not only promote space news, opinion, skepticism and logical thinking, I also...

In the first episode of A Green Space — A Green Earth at Astrocast.TV, my friend and astrophysicist Bente Lilja Bye gives a superb overview about the Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) that was finally launched in March. It’s a captivating show, detailing the...

Having been a reader of Discovery Space for a while now, I was excited to hear from the Discovery’s ace producer Dave Mosher, that the site had undergone a fairly radical face-lift. The excited the web designer inside me couldn’t wait to see what had been done, but it was also a relief that...

You don’t need the Large Hadron Collider to discover the Higgs boson after all… The moment of discovery. It turns out Higgsy is a little shy. This evening I went outside to investigate a noise. On opening the door I saw a small box lying awkwardly on its side against a flower pot. A little...