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Venusian Phosphine: A Call for Further Research

Written by Sarah Treadwell If you have never heard of phosphine before, be prepared to see it as the hot new buzz word in planetary science.  A press release by the Royal Astronomical Society revealed that the presence of phosphine was detected in the atmosphere of Venus by a team of researchers, including one of our scientists from BMSIS. While phosphine can be made in the laboratory and has been previously detected on Jupiter and Saturn, there’s no currently known […]

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Dr. Lev Horodyskyj: Science Education Gets a Virtual Makeover

by Emily Harari You’re driving and you pull up behind a car at a red light. The light switches to green, but the car sits unmoved. What do you do? Instinctively, you reach for the horn, and, after a quick blaring of sound, the car in front of you moves.  You’ve just conducted a scientific experiment. You observed the car not moving, but didn’t know why, so you assumed the driver ahead of you wasn’t paying attention to the road. […]

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Dr. Afshin Khan: Crops on Mars

by Emily Harari Every 4th of July, many Americans turn their gaze to the night sky. From a pop of color and a quick clap like thunder, fireworks unveil themselves. In addition to gunpowder, a lesser known ingredient called perchlorates are responsible for the mesmerizing explosions. Perchlorates are salts containing an ion called perchlorate – a chlorine atom bonded to four oxygen atoms. These salts can serve as oxidants for fireworks and explosives, but also can be toxic to living […]

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BMSIS Scientist Feature: Dr. Sanjoy Som

By Aditi Sharma On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. Age five at the time and living in Switzerland, Sanjoy Som was watching the news with his parents and was in awe and confusion of the fatal incident. He asked his parents what was happening and they told him that a group of people sent to space had been in a terrible accident. Sanjoy explains now, looking back, that he couldn’t believe […]

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“When I think of the Earth, I think about…”

By Rabeea Rasheed When I think of the Earth, I think about it as one strange rock orbiting in space around an average star. Earth makes me think about my place in the universe, forcing me to seek answers to some of the biggest questions – questions about our existence and mysteries of the universe such as what is the possibility of life somewhere out there, in the great unknown; if it exists, what would be the nature of that […]

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