Guest-Post on the Solar Environment

Over at Discover Magazine’s Discoblog I have a guest-post examining the wild interior of our favourite star. Head on over there to discover why a Red Dwarf-esque “mutton vindaloo beast” might be the least of your worries if you’re planning on constructing an energy mining platform.

What’s so great about the moon?

So, Newt Gingrich wants to build a moonbase. Bully for him. Being part of the Republican party, an organization not known for its support of grassroots science, it’s probably safe to say that Newt being a flagbearer for a base on the moon is more a political gambit than a scientific one. Back in the Sixties the United States got locked in a race with the USSR to be the first nation to set foot on the lunar surface. And what happened when they won? They promptly stopped sending astronauts there.