Tag Archives: hittingthebooks

Hitting the Books: This $80 prosthetic has helped millions walk again

Posted on by
The modern world around us — from the spaces we inhabit to the furniture we perch upon to the gadgets, tools and devices we hold in our hands — is implicitly designed for humans that fit within a specific bell curve of shape and ability. If you happe...

Hitting the Books: Volcanoes, mortal enemy of the mighty telescope

Posted on by
Humans are, as a species, hardwired to explore. We conquered the planet thanks to untold generations of people needing to see what lay over the next hill or around the next river bend and our infatuation with the stars is no different — we’ve wondere...

Hitting the Books: Why we’ll never see the edge of the universe

Posted on by
Death comes for us all, even on the cosmological scale. Our universe started off with a bang, and a rather large one at that, but how it will end remains a mystery. Will entropic effects cause it to cool and sputter out like a guttering flame or will...

Hitting the Books: Why women make better astronauts

Posted on by
Kate Greene knows better than most what it’s like to live on Mars. As a member of NASA’s inaugural 2013 HI-SEAS project, she spent four months in a simulated Martian environment on Hawaii’s Mauna Loa. In Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, Greene exami...

Hitting the Books: America needs a new public data system

Posted on by
Earlier this month the Trump administration stripped the CDC of its control over the nation’s Coronavirus data. By insisting that all case reporting be funneled through the White House, the administration further undermined public trust in its pandem...

Hitting the Books: How to huck a human into low Earth orbit

Posted on by
Astronauts may get the glory for successful spaceflights but they’d never even get off the ground if not for the folks at Mission Control. In Shuttle, Houston: My Life in the Center Seat of Mission Control, Paul Dye vividly recounts his 20-year caree...

Hitting the Books: What astronauts can learn from nuclear submariners

Posted on by
We’ve dreamt of colonizing the stars since our first tenuous steps across the moon, yet fifty years after the Apollo 11 mission, the prospect of living and working beyond the bounds of Earth remains tantalizingly out of reach. In his latest book, Spa...

Hitting the Books: The media’s role in history’s most damaging data dump

Posted on by
We humans are a deeply gullible bunch, willing to credulously believe any half truth, even outright lie, so long as it aligns with our existing opinions and preconceptions. The rise of modern media — especially the anonymous world of social media — h...

Hitting the Books: Can golf evolve and survive in the 21st century

Posted on by
If a childhood of watching Caddyshack on loop has taught me anything, is that golf is a game of zen. “Stop thinking, let things happen, and be the ball,” as Ty Webb famously told Danny out on the links. But can meditative nanananana mantras really st...