* Astronomy

Aryabhata, the great astronomer, was born in Kerala in 476 AD. He completed his studies at the University of Nalanda. He laid the basic foundation for the field of astronomy in India. When he was 23-years-old, he wrote his first treatise on the Sun. Around the 5th Century AD, many contributions were...

Mike Hutchinson. -- whose day job is running a painting and carpet-cleaning business -- is an amateur astronomer, but he shouldn't be confused with somebody who enjoys speculating about what the moon is made of while gazing through a telescope that would be equally suited to whacking Wiffle balls....

A boy from a rural village in Belize grows up to become a world-class mathematician and cosmologist. Arlie Petters' personal journey has taken him from a rural village in Belize to the streets of Brooklyn to the ivy-covered walls of academia. Through it all, he has gained a remarkable perspective an...

The 18th century astronomy community's reluctance to accept the accuracy of John Harrison's clocks is not one of the highs of scientific research. John Harrison (March 24, 1693March 24, 1776) was an English clockmaker who revolutioni...

The original sword of King Robert the Bruce was carried through Lamlash last Saturday by his direct descendant Lord Bruce of Kinloss to mark the 700th anniversary of Bruces journey from Rathlin Island to Arran. Lord Bruce lives in Fife and along with his three sons James, George and Benedict he was ta...

As a boy, Leland Melvin loved to watch the world go by from the back seat of the family car during camping trips to the beach and the mountains. In six months, Melvin, who grew up in Lynchburg and played football at the University of Richmond, will watch the entire world go by from the space shuttle Atlant...

NASA sought today to deflect criticism its chief received following skeptical comments he made on the topic of the agency's role in global warming research. During an interview Wednesday with NPR, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin expressed doubts that global warming was an issue that humans c...

Stanley Miller, a chemist who showed that, given the right conditions, simple organic compounds can form life, died this week at the age of 77 following a series of strokes. Read more

Calling fourth-grade teacher Jodi Vidaurri spacy would be paying her the highest compliment. Jodi Vidaurri, a fourth-grade teacher at Laurel Oak Elementary School, teaches her students during class Wednesday. She will attend Space Academy for Educators, a summer camp in Huntsville, Ala., in J...

Almost 28 years ago, a young (27) and still overdrawn Douglas Adams was poised on the brink of fame. The first radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy had been released ("Escaped," was more the word, according to Douglas) and largely ignored in a late night slot on BBC Radio 4. I...

The complete works of one of history's greatest scientists, Charles Darwin, are being published online. Source The site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publicatio...

Christopher Columbus, the man credited with discovering the Americas, was a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers, according to a document uncovered by Spanish historians. As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed ir...

A real-life Da Vinci mystery has been solved - historians have discovered where Leonardo's Mona Lisa was buried. Art investigator Giuseppe Pallanti made the discovery after poring over hundreds of ancient manuscripts. Da Vinci experts now hope to locate her coffin so that they can examine th...

After nearly a decade of court battles, scientists plan to begin studying the 9,300-year-old skeleton known as Kennewick Man next week. A team of scientists plans to examine the bones at the University of Washington's Burke Museum in Seattle beginning July 6, according to their attorney, Ala...

As a girl, Emilie de Breteuil lived with her family overlooking the Tuileries gardens in Paris, in an apartment with 30 rooms and 17 servants. But although her brothers and sisters turned out as might be expected, Emilie was different, as her father wrote: "My youngest flaunts her mind, and frigh...

Genghis Khan is making a comeback in Mongolia. His name is on streets, schools, a brand of vodka and many a newborn baby -- a sea change from the era when the Communists, who ruled the country until 1991, made even mentioning his name taboo since it was considered the epitome of imperialism. But with the...

Peter Hawkins, a British actor who voiced the sinister Daleks on "Dr. Who," has died at the age of 82. Hawkins began his acting career on stage after World War II service in the Navy. He helped create the distinctive sound of the Daleks, the sinister robotic enemies of Dr. Who, and of another Dr. Who ad...

In an appalling tragic coincidence, ED BISHOP and MICHAEL BILLINGTON, the two lead actors in Gerry Anderson's 1969 series UFO have both died this week within days of each other. Michael Bi...

Only days before Gagarin's successful journey, several European newspapers and radio stations told of a top-secret Soviet launch that carried another man into space. The Soviet Union denied this story vigorously. Now, for the first time, this program reveals with direct evidence that the first...

Growing up, we all ponder the deep questions of existence. How did the universe begin? Is there some meaning or purpose behind it all? Where do human beings fit in? As we age, though, we become more concerned with mortgage rates and day care, dental insurance and the stock market and only rarely, if eve...

Dr. Brian Greene (born February 9, 1963, New-York), is a physicist and one of the world's foremost string theorists. Since 2003 he has been a professor at Columbia University. Brian Greene’s book, The Fabric of the Cosmos, reveals him to be a scientific romantic in the tradition of Albe...

Steven Hawking has given a rare interview on the `Richard and Judy show on BBC television. He gives his views, and insights, into life , time travel, the universe and the Simpsons. Weblink (3.6Mb .mp3) -- Edited by Blobrana...

A Lecture given by Albert Einstein 84 years ago is set to be re-enacted today in the university where it was first held. The German physicist's 1921 presentation is taking place at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Hall. This time, the lecture will be in English with Einstein, who h...

Margaret Huss grew up around meteorites, so marrying Glenn Huss was a good fit. Margaret Huss and her husband operated the American Meteorite Laboratory in Westminster for three decades before she died April 14. She was 82. The laboratory was originally in Arizona, where Margaret Huss' father, H....

The father of Indian astronomy and the architect of the giant metrewave radio telescope (GMRT), Govind Swarup, has recently been honoured with the Grote Reber Medal, 2007 for lifetime, innovative achievement in radio astronomy. The Australia Telescope National Facility, which conferred the a...

US space pioneer Walter Schirra, one of the original Mercury Seven astronauts who flew Nasa's earliest flights, has died aged 84. He was the only man to fly on Nasa's Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programmes. In 1962 he became the third American to orbit the Earth. Three years later he led the first meeti...

Asteroid searcher hopes his discoveries won't produce direct impact Rich Kowalski is a jovial fellow who loves his job but approaches it with a certain sense of dread. Kowalski doesn't want to be the guy who finds the asteroid headed for Earth that will wipe out our species. But that's pretty much his...

You may recall Isaac Newton's famous quote: If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants. One of those giants was the flamboyant silver-nosed Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. His accurate pre-telescopic observations laid the groundwork for modern astronomy. H...

Often overshadowed by her famous brother William, Caroline Herschel became a renowned observer in her own right and the world's first female professional astronomer. Read more Caroline Lucretia Hersch...

[url=http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/02/BA9V13RA8T.DTL&type=s...

It's a moment when all Israelis remember where they were and what they were doing. In 2003, pride turned to grief in an instant when the space shuttle Columbia and its crew - including Israeli astronaut Col. Ilan Ramon - perished when re-entering the earth's atmosphere. [url=http://www.israel21c...

Among the hordes of schoolchildren gathered at Nehru Planetarium in Worli on Saturday morning stood a man who is all set to make space history next year. Santosh George Kulangara, 37, slated to become the first Indian space tourist, recently touched down in Mumbai on a short trip. [url=http://time...

American billionaire Charles Simonyi, a computer software executive who paid more than $20 million to fly to the International Space Station aboard a Russian-built Soyuz capsule in spring 2007, will train for a second Soyuz trip to the space station in spring 2009. [url=http://www.msnbc.msn.c...

Al-Hayatham, known in Latin as Alhazen, wrote books on medicine as well as Mathematics, Physics and Astronomy. He wrote commentaries on the works of Aristotle and Galen, and also did original experiments with light, coming up with some of the first accounts of refraction, a mathematical method to...

Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' online[url=http://carlsagancosmos.blogspot.com/]http://carlsaganc...

Two Lincoln Park Academy high school students have won awards in competition with more than 1,500 students from 56 countries at the Intel International Science Fair in Reno, Nevada. Read more...

Astronomer Lisa Kewley laid the foundations of her galactic inquiry during PhD research at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics on Mt Stromlo. Since then, shes journeyed to the University of Hawaii to use some of the largest telescopes in the world. For her work studying the formation...

Bohdan Paczynski, renowned astrophysicist, dies at age 67 Princeton astrophysicist Bohdan Paczynski, whose insights into the nature of celestial phenomena guided many developments in his field, died April 19 after a three-year battle with brain cancer. He was 67. Paczynski's pioneering effo...

Dorrit Hoffleit sits near the window of her New Haven apartment, feeling every bit of her 99 years, 10 months, and five days. She is weak. She can no longer make the short walk to the Yale University astronomy department. She can't hear very well, and she now needs a caretaker with her day and night....

Alan Hale, PhD, achieved worldwide recognition when Comet Hale-Bopp whooshed through the skies in the early months of 1997. But Hales contributions are not limited to the co-discovery of the most widely-viewed comet in history. He has studied extensively the threat posed by near-Earth asteroid...

Richard Dawkins reads excerpts from The God Delusion and answers questions at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia on October 23, 2006. This Q&A features many questions from Jerry Falwell's Liberty "University" students. In Richard's tour journal he says: "Many of th...

Russian space enthusiasts are kicking off a year of major anniversaries on Friday with ceremonies marking the centenary of the birth of Sergei Korolyov, the founder of the Soviet space program and quite possibly the man most responsible for sparking the “space race.” September brings the 150...

Carnegie Institution planetary-formation theorist, and 1997 National Medal of Science recipient, George Wetherill, died from heart failure on July 19, 2006, at his Washington, D.C., home. Wetherill revolutionised our understanding of how our planets and solar system formed through his theo...

Ave Kludze: Ghana's rocket man He was not able to fulfil his childhood dream of being a pilot, but Ghanaian scientist Dr. Ave Kludze has arguably gone one better: developing and flying spacecrafts for NASA. The 43-year-old didn't enter orbit when controlling a NASA rocket to launch the Calipso envi...

Cosmonaut Pavel Popovich who piloted the Vostok-4 spacecraft on 12-15th August, 1962, and commanded the Soyuz-14 mission on 3-19th July, 1974, has died in hospital in the Crimean city of Hurzuf, where he had been taken following a stroke. A Mars-crossing asteroid (8444 Popovich) and an Antarctic...

[url=http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1251804559879&...

18 December, 2007[url=http://www.russiatoday.ru/Art_and_Fun/2007-12-18/Chi...

On Sept. 12, Mary and Marty talked to Dr. Laurie Leshin about Launch Fest at the NASA Goddard Flight Center. Read more

Stephen Hawking's successor named[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/england/cambridgeshire/8316955.stm]Read

[url=http://www.neatorama.com/2007/10/04/lise-meitner-mother-of-t...

Irene Early, a design engineer for aerospace giant Rockwell whose name is part of the Space Walk of Fame Museum, was a single mother of two and one of the firm's few female engineers when she was asked to come up with some practical uses for Velcro. [url=http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-obi...

Born June 12, 1958 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but considered New York City and Merritt Island, Florida, to be his hometowns. He died on October 3, 2009 following a 2-1/2 year battle with a brain tumour. He is survived by his wife, the former Donna Marie Emero of Huntington Beach, California, and tw...

PBS Specials _ Journey to Palomar Click to Play | View Details The film traces the story of the Chicago-born astronomer George Ellery Hale as he struggles to build the greatest telescopes of the 20th century.

The Venerable Bede, based at the Wearmouth-Jarrow twin monastery site, is famed for his theological works and for being the father of English history. But Bede, one of the leading scholars in 8th Century Europe, was also an outstanding scientist. Last night a new permanent gallery at Bede's World i...

John O'Sullivan, an Australian radio astronomer who helped develop wi-fi technology has won the Prime Minister's prestigious Science Prize. Wi-fi technology has become an essential part of everyday life. It is found in personal computers, video games, mobile phones and much more. [url=http:/...

By day Tim Doucette is legally blind and can barely see across the street, but when darkness falls he can see far into space. The Moncton, N.B.-based computer programmer was born with cataracts, and surgeons removed the lenses in his eyes when he was an infant. The procedure left his eyes overly sensi...

Sir Christopher Wren (20 October 1632 - 25 February 1723) was a 17th century English designer, astronomer, geometer, mathematician-physicist and one of the greatest English architects in history. "Since the time of Archimedes there scarce ever met in one man in so great perfection such a me...

Archimedes the Greatest Mathematician Click to Play | View Details

World renowned astronomer, Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson from Imperial College London, will give a lecture at the University of Ulsters Belfast campus tomorrow night. A former President of the Royal Astronomical Society and winner of the 2008 Hoyle Medal, Professor Rowan-Robinson will de...

Kuipers to make second trip into space[url=http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2009/08/kuipers_to_make_second_trip_in.ph...

Anaximander the Father of Cosmology Click to Play | View Details

Arthur C Clarke has turned 90, and he has released a short video of his birthday reflections... "Hello! This is Arthur Clarke, speaking to you from my home in Colombo, Sri Lanka. As I approach my 90th birthday, my friends are asking how it feels like, to have completed 90 orbits around the Sun.&qu...

In the rarefied world of amateur astrophotographers, Thierry Legault is known for pictures of astonishing clarity and mystery. "We're like people who travel the world to see animals. I travel the universe and take pictures of everything in the sky" - Thierry Legault. [url=http://onl...

Carl Sagan - Eratosthenes Click to Play | View Details

This is Week 33 of AsianWeeks salute to Chinese American heroes, in strategic partnership with Chinese American Heroes, a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to documenting the contributions of Chinese Americans to America and the world. This week we would like to talk about a very unusual p...

Professor Denzil Dexter of the University of Southern California. Professor Denzil Dexter Click to Play | View Details

This month, another anniversary has taken place, but one quite obscure except to some dealers, collectors and researchers of meteorites. Eighty-six years ago, on Nov. 9, 1923, a then-unknown, middle-aged science professor named Harvey Nininger was walking home from work in McPherson, Kan. Sud...

In little over two months, famed Egyptologist Dr Zahi Hawass hopes to unearth the discovery of his lifetime: the tomb of one of history's greatest women, Cleopatra. Hawass suspects Cleopatra is buried with her Roman lover Mark Antony at a temple 30km from Alexandra called Tabusiris Magna. "...

Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 B.C., studied under Plato and tutored Alexander the Great. Later, in Athens, he taught in the grounds of the Lyceum, a public sports complex frequented by the city's young men. The remains of the ancient school where philosopher Aristotle taught his pupils nearl...

This year, Ashish Thakkar, who believes heights have always worked magic for him, is planning a far more daring escapade that is going to take him rather higher than the top of the Burj al Arab. The 28 year-old resident of Kampala is among the initial group of Virgin Galactic space tourists who have sig...

Adam Solomon: A Young Astrophysicist Studies Old Dwarfs Brown dwarfs are basically failed stars. In normal stars, the swirling balls of gas present during the star's formation become so big that they press in on themselves, forming a central core that is dense enough to cause hydrogen atoms to fuse...

79-year-old James E. Collins of Rochester, father of space shuttle commander Eileen Collins, who was struck by a car in front of Kings Bar on West Washington Avenue, Elmira, US, on Monday night has died. Jim Collins was in Elmira on Monday to hear his daughter speak at Edison and Notre Dame high scho...

Composer György Sándor Ligeti died on Monday. He was 83. Ligeti passed away in Vienna, Austria, after battling a long illness and spending the last three weeks confined to a wheelchair. György Sándor Ligeti (born May 28, 1923) was a Jewish Hungarian composer born in Romania who later became an A...

A plane flown by record-breaking US adventurer Steve Fossett is missing in the Nevada desert, US federal aviation officials have said. Mr Fossett was reportedly last seen taking off from the private airfield at the Flying M Ranch near Yerington, Nevada, on Monday evening. [url=http://news.bbc....

Malaysias second astronaut Mejar Dr Faiz Khaleed was injured in the left hand after he and a friend were attacked by two men in front of his house in Taman Mawar, Ampang, here early today. He is in stable condition at the Gleneagles Medical Centre here. [url=http://www.nst.com.my/Current_News/NS...

Ralph Asher Alpher, 86, a physicist whose doctoral dissertation provided a feasible formula for the scientific idea of the big bang but whose work was forgotten until after other scientists won the Nobel Prize for the same idea, died of respiratory failure Aug. 12 at an acute care facility in Austin...

Shuttle astronaut becomes father in space Astronaut Randolph Bresnik becomes a father in space after his wife gives birth to a daughter back home on Earth in Texas. Read more

Patrick Moore celebrates 75yrs BAA membership Click to Play | View Details A day of lectures "Past, present and future of amateur astronomy" at the Royal Institute - London to celebrate Sir Patrick Moore's 75 years membership of the British Astronomical Assoc.

Ex-USSR cosmonaut Konstantin Feoktistov has died Konstantin Feoktistov was the USSR's first civilian cosmonaut and crew member of the 1964 Voskhod spaceship. Konstantin Petrovich Feoktistov (February 7, 1926 - November 22, 2009) was a Soviet cosmonaut and an eminent space engineer. He also wr...

Anders Celsius (27 November 1701 25 April 1744) was a Swedish astronomer. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale which takes his name. Read more

Brian H. Mason, 92, a Smithsonian scientist who was internationally known for his study of meteorites and moon rocks and who was the first to discover that a rock found in Antarctica came from the moon, died of renal failure Dec. 3 at his home in Chevy Chase. [url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-...

NCsoft, South Korea's largest game company by revenue, said its American game director Richard Garriott will fly to the International Space Station in the fall of 2008, only a few months after Ko San takes the exactly same flight to become the nation's first astronaut. [url=http://www.koreatime...

Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams has reached Ahmedabad on a week-long visit to India. Williams will spend most of her time in Gujarat, which is her father Deepak Pandya's native state. She is also scheduled to visit the Sabarmati Ashram in the state. The flight engineer is the daughter of a...

Human remains excavated in a cathedral in northern Poland are very likely those of the Renaissance astronomer Nicolas Copernicus, archaeologists working in the cathedral said. The remain...

Sir Isaac Newton FRS (4 January 1643 31 March 1727 [OS: 25 December 1642 20 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian who is perceived and considered by a substantial number of scholars and the general public as one of the mos...

A former director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Lew Allen Jr., passed away Monday night, Jan. 4, at the age of 84, in Potomac Falls, Va. He led the laboratory from 1982 till 1990, during a period that included the launches of the Galileo mission to Jupiter, Magellan to Venus and the Infrared Ast...

Prince Sultan bin Salman, the first astronaut from Saudi Arabia and the Middle East to go into space, has said his mission in space proved to be the catalyst for the region's drive toward science and technology. In his keynote address at the Global Space Technology Forum in Abu Dhabi recently the prin...

Royal Astronomical Society honours young astronomer The Royal Astronomical Society has announced the recipients of the Society's medals and awards for 2010. The prizes honour individuals and groups who have made an outstanding contribution to astronomy and geophysics. Dr Elizabeth Stanway o...

Renowned cosmonaut Valentin Lebedev, who set a world record for his stay in Earth's orbit, is rapidly losing his eyesight. "I suffered from a lot of radiation in space. It was all concealed back then, during the Soviet years, but now I can say that I caused damage to my health because of that fligh...

Dr. Wilhelm Raithel, one of the original members of Dr. Wernher von Braun's team of German rocket scientists, died Nov. 15 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 95. Raithel was born in Hoechst an der Nidder in Germany and later worked as a civil engineer in Munich. In World War II, a civilian draft order a...

Edwin Salpeter, whose theories revolutionised astrophysics, died at his home in Ithaca Nov. 25. He was 83. Read more

Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a woman on a mission to reveal the friendly face of physics Physicists love to talk about "paradigm shifts". Their discipline is littered with them: dramatic changes in thinking that fundamentally altered the way scientists look at the world. For Professor Jocel...

The man who killed Pluto is coming to town to tell us how he did it. Mike Brown is the CalTech astronomer who discovered objects in the vicinity of Pluto that led to its demotion from "ninth planet" to "dwarf" in August 2006. He understands that some people are upset about that. [u...

By day Steven E. Mazlin tends to his patients, those with multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, brain tumors, and other neurological ailments. When darkness comes, another world beckons, luring Mazlin down a curving staircase into the basement of his palatial Upper Makefield home and out to his one-acr...

Penny Sackett has spent her professional career pondering galactic structures, searching for extrasolar planets and divining the presence of dark matter. Now she is coming back to earth. The Federal Government announced yesterday it had appointed the American-born astronomer as Australia's...

Dave Jessie loads his 12-inch computer-controlled telescope onto his tractor and manoeuvres from his home to the next-door field behind Fishcreek Elementary School on Friday nights from early spring until late fall. That is his forum to tell anyone who shows up about the world of astronomy at his W...

A New Zealand coroner has concluded that the reasons surrounding the death from methanol poisoning of an Australian scientist working at the South Pole eight years ago, remain a mystery. Dr Rodney David Marks, 32, died in May 2000 while working with 49 other scientists at a research base operated by...

Adam Riess is a man of science, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins University who has measured the accelerating expansion of the universe. He knows more than most people about Einstein's cosmological constant and Type 1a supernovae. [url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-...

[url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

Leroy Chiao - 1st Chinese-American astronaut Leroy Chiao is the first Chinese-American astronaut to walk in space. He's been paying a lot of attention to China's space program. Read more

Amateur astronomer gets access to space telescope David Gamey, an amateur astronomer, recently won a competition to collaborate with scientists to study a star using the MOST space telescope Read more

The man who revolutionised amateur astronomy with a cheap, easy-to-build telescope is at the Discovery Museum this week, spreading his infectious love for heavenly objects. John L. Dobson's great contribution to science was the rugged Dobsonian telescope that can be built with cast-off constr...

Pioneering JPL radar astronomer Steven J. Ostro died early in the morning of December 15, 2008. The world has lost one of the most skilled scientists tracking and studying the asteroids that pass close by our planet and might one day threaten the survival of our civilization. [url=http://planetar...

A well-known astronomer has been honoured on Australia Day for something he just can't help himself doing: talking to the public about astronomy. Professor Fred Watson, astronomer-in-charge of the Anglo-Australian Observatory, was today appointed a Member in the General Division of the Order...

Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 - 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Niels Bohr was a goalkeeper in the Danish team Akademisk Boldklu...

Eileen Collins: Space Pioneer Click to Play | View Details Born in Elmira, New York, Eileen Collins became an astronaut in 1991, after being selected for the astronaut program while attending the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California. Fifteen years ago, On February 3, 1995 she clai...

Clyde William Tombaugh (February 4, 1906 - January 17, 1997) was an American astronomer. Tombaugh is best known for discovering the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930, but also discovered many asteroids, and called for serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects. [url=http://en.wikip...

Hans Rudi Giger (born February 5 1940) is a Swiss artist. Giger is known for developing the style, which he calls "biomechanical art". Read more

Brian May, the guitarist with the rock group Queen, has returned to his first love of astronomy with plans for a book on “the complete history of the universe”. He is working with Sir Patrick Moore, the astronomer, and Chris Lintott, Moore’s co-presenter on the BBC’s [url=http://my...

James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty the chief engineer in the original “Star Trek'' TV series died on Wednesday 1230 GMT at his Redmond, Washington, home with his wife of 28 years, Wende. He was 85. He had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2004.

Wilko Johnson, who was the cult lead guitarist in trailblazing Canvey band Dr Feelgood, is proving there are other reasons to stay up late. Wilko is excited about astronomy and there are even those who would like to see him take over from Patrick Moore on long-running BBC show the Sky at Night. [url=ht...

Engineer and astronomer Bill Gordon, who designed and managed the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, has died of natural causes at his home. Read more

Australia gallery officials have announced that a painting, entitled Head of a Man, that had been thought to be by the Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh has been proven to be by another artist. The painting is owned by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne who acquired it in 1940 and had been valu...

The Russian Federal Space Agency officially announced that Iranian born Anoushe Ansari would travel in space on the Soyuz aircraft next spring. It is not an official Russian-Iranian flight, since Ms. Ansari, a U.S. citizen, is to fund the flight on her own to become the first female space to...

Former astronaut Neil Armstrong will be given his honorary degree from Edinburgh University in Washington DC later this week. The ceremony is part of a series of events designed to celebrate the university's strong ties with the United States. [url=http://news.scotsman.com/education/City...

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955) was a German-born Swiss-American theoretical physicist, philosopher and author who is widely regarded as one of the most influential and best known scientists and intellectuals of all time. [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einste...

Italian astronomer Andrea Boattini broke the record for the number of new comets sighted in one year when he spotted his seventh at Christmas. The previous record had been held for some 150 years by Italian astronomers Francesco De Vito and Giovanni Battista Donati who in the mid-1800s sighted six c...

[url=http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10632525]Read

James Lovelock, CH, CBE, FRS (born 26 July 1919) is an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurologist who lives in Devon, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet h...

Gerhard Zucker (1908 - 1985) was a German businessman and rocket engineer. However, none of his machinations proved to be operational, ranging from outright fraud to total failure. Born in Hasselfelde, he first came to public notice in 1931, when he began to work on the problem of transporting mail...

Like all famous historical figures, Zheng He, the greatest navigator in Chinese history, has not escaped controversy. The size of his fleet ships and the routes his voyages took continue to ignite heated debates worldwide. At last week's first international forum on Zheng He's voyages held in Qin...

Herschel relatives visit Slough Hanoverian grandmother, Margrit Wesphal, and her niece, Claudia Assmann, made the 450 mile trip from West Saxony on Sunday to learn more about their distant relative: Sloughs favourite son, William Herschel. [url=http://www.sloughobserver.co.uk/articles...

It is 100 years since the birth of the only British woman ever to have won a Nobel Prize for science. Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who lived most of her adult life in Warwickshire, is credited with discovering the three dimensional structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. [url=http://news....

On 14 May 2010, Roger Davies, Philip Wetton Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford, will become President of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS). Professor Davies will begin his term of office at the 190th Annual General Meeting of the RAS and will serve until May 2012. [url=http:/...

Myleene Angela Klass has been an amateur astronomer for most of her life, having been taught the basics by her father. She was one of only a handful of celebrities, engineers and scientists who were at the UK London "control centre" for the touch-down of the UK Mars probe Beagle 2 in the earl...

A team of investigators is heading to one of the most remote islands in the Pacific next week to resolve a 70-year-old mystery: what happened to Amelia Earhart, the world's most famous woman aviator. The glamorous adventurer, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, disappeared along with n...

Charles Messier (26 June 1730 - 12 April 1817) was a French astronomer most notable for publishing an astronomical catalogue consisting of deep sky objects such as nebulae and star clusters that came to be known as the 103 "Messier objects". Read more

Julie Payette, CQ (born October 20, 1963 in Montreal, Quebec) is a Canadian engineer and a Canadian Space Agency (CSA) astronaut. Payette has completed two spaceflights, STS-96 and STS-127, logging more than 25 days in space. She serves as Chief Astronaut for the CSA, and has served in other role...

Astrophysicist Dr Jennifer Wiseman on 'life out there' Dr Jennifer Wiseman is the American astrophysicist recently appointed as senior project scientist for the Hubble telescope at Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Centre. She is in the UK to give a lecture on exoplanets, the possibility of life elsew...

On this day in 1639, Jeremiah Horrocks made the first observation of a transit of Venus. (November 24 under the Julian calendar.)