Eric Berger, Ars Tech
On Tuesday and Wednesday Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Kennedy Space Center in Florida to tour facilities there and participate in the second meeting of the National Space Council. It is not clear how much of the launch facilities he will see during his visit to Florida, where NASA is spending billions of dollars to build ground systems for the launch of the Space Launch System rocket.
Carrie Arnold, Mosaic
Every morning, Prasart Songsorn used to wake before dawn to head out to the fields before the tropical sun and oppressive humidity made it impossible to work. Prasart, who spent all his 56 years on his family's small rice farm in north-eastern Thailand, worked barefoot in the warm mud. Boots amplified the heat and humidity, and he didn't want to buy something that would only add to his misery.
David Shukman, BBC
In the summer of 1974, a large and highly unusual ship set sail from Long Beach in California.It was heading for the middle of the Pacific where its owners boasted it would herald a revolutionary new industry beneath the waves.
Paul McDivitt, Genetic Lit Project
While many studies show that genetically modified crops contribute to yield gains, GMO critics say that they don't. Such claims, they say, are industry talking points drawn from industry-funded studies.Most recently and notably, the New York Times' Danny Hakim asserted in a 2016 front-page analysis that "genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields."
Amy Maxmen, Undark
In 1905, British archaeologists descended on a sliver of eastern Africa, aiming to uncover and extract artifacts from 3,000-year-old temples. They left mostly with photographs, discouraged by the ever-shifting sand dunes that blanketed the land. We sank up to the knees at every step, Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist and philologist, wrote at the time, adding: [We] made several trial diggings in other parts of the site, but we found nothing worth carrying away.
Baumgardt & Drinkwater, Conversation
So far, all black holes discovered by astronomers fall into two broad categories: stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes.But what puzzles astronomers is why the two extremes what about intermediate-sized black holes?
