America wasn’t familiar with losing astronauts when Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee burned to death in their Apollo capsule on the launch pad during a 1967 test of their Saturn 1B rocket. We’d never lost an astronaut before Read more →
There are only two kinds of Minnesota drivers in winter: The ones who do this, and the ones who don’t. It is of questionable value and meaning. In freezing rain, theoretically, it could prevent breaking the wiper when pulling it out of the ice. This, however, requires an ice pack equal to or greater than Read more →
Maybe we should call it the Minnesota diet. Researchers say cold weather can make you thinner, Time.com is reporting today. Read more →
The old stove loses a pal, should marijuana be legalized in Minnesota, how Minnesota researchers starved people to learn about starvation, the sports-related discussion we really should be having, and the gift of sight for an elderly woman. Read more →
The older we get, the greater our chances of being the grateful rather than the hero.
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What does a dying comet look like? This. The comet ISON, previously declared dead as it circled the sun, then thought alive when pieces of it appeared to survive, is, in fact, dead, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced today. Its demise was captured by the SOHO spacecraft. Astrophysicist Karl Battams, at the Comet ISON Read more →
Does the NPR reporter’s FoxNews work affect her credibility? Following the Red Cross’ Hurricane Sandy money, Minnesota as an unfair hockey factory, people in a vegetative state may be more alive than we think, and can trains pave the way to a more bike-friendly Minnesota? Read more →
The roots of an epidemic, the problem with dead bodies, learning to read at 54, job seekers on stage, and a home for orphan Konny. Read more →
Let’s face it. Football fans don’t much care that the constant hitting and brain-smashing action is killing the athletes of the National Football League — a fact that is overwhelmingly proven in Tuesday’s PBS Frontline series, “League of Denial: The NFL’s Concussion Crisis.” So you could probably scroll right past most of the two hours Read more →
It’s nice to have someone at least talking about innovation, a typical year on the Minnesota farm, Star Tribune’s warning about those New Jersey businesspeople, why has the number of women in the workplace stalled, and more Minnesota moments. Read more →
Breaking the government intentionally, is it hot in here, close encounters of the Marshall County kind, the search for the family of a Marine killed on Saipan in WWII, and why old buildings matter. Read more →
That dot there? That’s us. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft took pictures of Earth from nearly 900 million miles away on Friday. It took a day to send them back. Cassini fans took the images, stretched and pasted them, adjusted the color. Guillermo Abramson, a physicist at Argentina’s Bariloche Atomic Center, came up with this striking image. Read more →
A new documentary on a plane crash 17 years ago must have the National Transportation Safety Board rattled, because the NTSB today announced an unusual background briefing next week in the crash of TWA Flight 800. “The TWA Flight 800 investigation remains one of the NTSB’s most extensive and exhaustive investigations; the final report includes Read more →
If you live in Minnesota or the rest of the Upper Midwest, this is the week to deliver payback to your friends who spend the winter in Arizona, and delight in sending e-mails in January that it’ll be so cold tonight — 75 — that they might have to put on a sweater.
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The next time you watch a baseball player throw a pitch, you can thank a hunter from two million years ago, apparently. If it weren’t for our ability to throw, we’d all be having lunch eating our front lawns today. The BBC reports on a study in Nature that traces the origins of humans’ ability Read more →
Bob Collins