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Comet C/2014 E2 Jacques has returned! Before it disappeared in the solar glow this spring, the comet reached magnitude +6, the naked eye limit. Now it’s back at dawn, rising higher each morning as it treks toward darker skies. Just days after its July 2 perihelion, the fuzzball will be in conjunction with the planet Venus tomorrow morning July 13. With Mercury nearby, you may have the chance to see this celestial ‘Rat Pack’ tucked within a 8° circle.

On this day in 1961, Alan B. Shepard Jr. muttered to himself, "Don't f*** up, Shepard...", huddled into the Freedom 7 Mercury capsule, and lifted off to become the first America to reach space. These are the photographs from the historic suborbital flight.

Cilantro was described as an aphrodisiac in the Arabian Nights, but that fact fails to impress those who hate it with a passion. Cilantro was described as an aphrodisiac in "The Arabian Nights," but that fact fails to impress those who hate it with a passion. Julia Child famously told Larry King that it has a "dead taste," and she would pick it out of a dish "and throw it on the floor." The pro-cilantro crowd is just as vocal, if not as descriptive. You can find the debate anywhere you find cilantro and the people who meticulously pick it...

A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's first emission standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants. In its ruling, the court rejected state and industry challenges to rules designed to clean up chromium, arsenic, acid gases, nickel, cadmium as well as mercury and other dangerous toxins. The EPA’s determination in 2000 that regulating emission standards is appropriate and necessary, and the agency’s reaffirmation of that determination in 2012, “are amply supported by EPA’s findings regarding the health effects of mercury exposure,” said the court. Congress did not specify what...

Deep down, the moon may be more like Earth than scientists ever thought. A new moon-rock study suggests the satellite has an iron core... The moon's core could be a clue to its ancient origins, which have long puzzled astronomers. "Our moon is too big to be a moon," Taylor said. "It's huge compared to the moons we see around other planets, so it has always been suspected that there was something strange in its origin." ...Rock samples from NASA's Apollo 15 and Apollo 17 moon missions of the early 1970s have now shed more light on the moon's origins,...

<p>When NASA astronauts were suiting up to go to space in the 1960s, they had to make a big decision before they explored the world above us: How large of a man are you?</p> <p>Getting it wrong could damage the mission.</p>

The Obama administration’s War on Carbon rages, but the good news is the incandescent light bulb still lives. For the third year in a row, the federal ban on the popular incandescent light bulb — the choice of most Americans — was postponed by Republican House intervention that defunded EPA enforcement of the law. “None of the funds made available in this Act may be used . . . to implement or enforce the standards with respect to incandescent reflector lamps,” reads section 322 of the $1.1 trillion budget signed by the president in January. The language was cheered by...

Line up Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars according to their distance from the sun and you'll see their size distribution is close to symmetrical, with the two largest planets between the two smallest. That would be no coincidence -- if the pattern emerged from a debris ring around the sun. Brad Hansen of the University of California, Los Angeles, built a numerical simulation to explore how a ring of rocky material in the early solar system could have evolved into the planets. He found that two larger planets typically form near the inner and outer edges of the ring, corresponding...

Are you ready for some lunar versus planetary occultation action? One of the best events for 2014 occurs early this Wednesday morning on February 26th, when the waning crescent Moon — sometimes referred to as a decrescent Moon — meets up with a brilliant Venus in the dawn sky. This will be a showcase event for the ongoing 2014 dawn apparition of Venus that we wrote about recently. This is one of 16 occultations of a planet by our Moon for 2014, which will hide every naked eye classical planet except Jupiter and only one of two involving Venus this...

Explanation: There is a road that connects the Northern to the Southern Cross but you have to be at the right place and time to see it. The road, as pictured above, is actually the central band of our Milky Way Galaxy; the right place, in this case, is dark Laguna Cejar in Salar de Atacama of Northern Chile; and the right time was in early October, just after sunset. Many sky wonders were captured then, including the bright Moon, inside the Milky Way arch; Venus, just above the Moon; Saturn and Mercury, just below the Moon; the Large and...

Next time you apply make-up, remember the fairness creams could contain mercury and the lipsticks may come packed with chromium, which can cause cancer. A new study by the Centre for Science and Environment's (CSE) Pollution Monitoring Lab (PML) has found mercury in 44 per cent of all the fairness creams it tested, while chromium was found in almost 50 per cent and nickel in 43 per cent of the lipstick samples tested.

It is frustrating, at a time when other nations are in ascendancy in space, that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama seems committed to undermining the nation's own solar system exploration program. The Obama administration cut NASA's planetary-sciences budget by 20 percent in 2013. It has taken the National Research Council's (NRC) recommendations for prioritizing planetary investments in bad economic times and turned those recommendations upside down. The administration continues to favor large, directed projects at the expense of programs and missions that are openly competed.

<p>ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) - New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has signed a law requiring manufacturers of thermostats with mercury to collect their old temperature controls in an effort to keep mercury out of the environment.</p> <p>The measure requires they establish collection programs and in 2015 start filing annual reports on collections.</p>

Was trying to find out if there any USAF units solely dedicated to dropping nuclear test bombs in the Pacific and Nevada.

Autism advocates are set to protest tomorrow against a quiet effort by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration to require annual flu vaccinations for all New York City schoolchildren.On Wednesday, with just three weeks to go until he leaves office, Mr. Bloomberg’s controversial Board of Health is set to vote on new rules that would force children as young as six months old to be immunized each year before December 31 if they attend licensed day care or pre-school programs.“Young children have a high risk of developing severe complications from influenza. One-third of children under five in New York City do not...

Explanation: Still intact, on November 21 Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) swept into this animated field of view (left) from the HI-1 camera on the STEREO-A spacecraft. The camera has also captured periodic Comet Encke, Mercury, and Earth, with the Sun cropped out of the frame at the right, the source of the billowing solar wind. From STEREO's perspective in interplanetary space, planet Earth is actually the most distant of the group, seen in its orbit beyond the Sun. Mercury is closest, but both planets are still so bright they create sharp vertical lines in the camera's detector. Both comets clearly...

Discretionary Spending--Option 11 Eliminate Human Space Exploration Programs The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Human Exploration and Operations programs focus on developing systems and capabilities required to explore deep space while continuing operations in low- Earth orbit. The exploration programs fund research and development of the next generation of systems for deep space exploration and provide technical and financial support to the commercial space industry. Complementing those efforts, NASA's space operations programs involve operating in low-Earth orbit, most notably using the International Space Station, as well as providing space communications capabilities. This option would terminate NASA's human space exploration...

A PNNL staff member removed a burned-out compact piggy tail light bulb in his home and replaced it with a new one. When he turned on the switch, only a portion of the new bulb lit up. Assuming it was defective, he turned off the switch to remove it. Grasping the bulb, he felt a pain as if he had been cut by glass, and found a small, burn. Removing the bulb, he noticed the plastic base (see pix) was blackened at the point where it connected to the mercury tube.

Happy 50th birthday to the telescope that brought us the first map of Venus, revealed ice on Mercury, and more. When Cornell University built the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico -- near the equator, so it could observe the planets without needing to move its 1,000-foot-wide reflector -- people hadn't even set foot on the moon yet. They wouldn't for another six years. Since its construction, Arecibo has contributed to generations of astronomy. Researchers first set its radar and radio instruments to discover basics, such as the speed of Mercury and Venus' rotations and the surface features of the moon...

Back in December, I wrote about the absurdity of the EPA claim that coal-fired power plants produced significant mercury which necessitated drastic reductions at any cost. I was then puzzled that the EPA did not produce maps of the mercury concentrations that would show the mercury was found in higher concentrations downwind of coal-fired power plants. It turns out that maps of the concentrations of mercury do exist and can be examined. The National Atmospheric Deposition Program produces annual maps of the mercury concentrations across the USA here. Note that the mercury high concentration areas changed somewhat between 2009 and...