PAGING PROFESSOR FRODO: Over the course of my Internet wanderings a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a fascinating abstract in the arXiv by one Alejandro Gangui on the 13th century cosmology of Dante's Divine Comedy. To my chagrin, the paper is in Spanish, so I was unable to peruse this unusual academic offering in-depth...

CELESTIAL WANDERER: The discovery of new objects in the solar system has become almost routine; the discovery of new asteroids is important but routine. Just occasionally, though, an object is found which is in some way weird enough that it immediately garners attention...

SEEING A STELLAR TRIANGLE: I’m remembering back to the early days of my astronomical career, growing up in Winnipeg and, as a kid, staying up late to stargaze in my backyard. The first stars I can remember identifying by name were three prominent ones in the northern summer sky...

MCCAIN, OBAMA WEIGH IN ON SPACE: The highway to space cuts across dozens of districts but few are more vested in America’s off-planet endeavors than central Florida, home to the Kennedy Space Center, the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station and blueprints for a state-run commercial space zone...

GUEST BLOGGER: U VA. STUDENT’S EYES ON THE SKIES: This is the first of a new regular feature for Next Generation, a guest blog by a student scientist. If you're a student working in the areas of astronomy, space research or any related field and would like to write a guest blog post in coming weeks, let me know...

START ME UP: This post has been on the backburner for a bit -- hey, I had some Great Planet Debate action to attend to. Anyways, let's talk about CERN's Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, that is under Geneva, Switzerland and part of France. First of all: The Large Hadron Collider? WTF? ...