Why I’d Live in a Museum for a Month

July 26th, 2011
By Dave Mosher

You have 30 days to squeeze every ounce of awesome out of one of the biggest, baddest museums on Earth.

What would you do?

That’s what the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago asked hopefuls for the institution’s second and final “Month at the Museum” contest.

Being the über-curious and outgoing science reporter that I am, I couldn’t resist. My (hopefully) dark horse entry galloped into the stable of applications before the gates closed yesterday.

One part of the application called for a 60-second video showing off you + your creativity. For the $0.00 production above, I braved grumpy security guards, dodged speeding trains, fought sleep and turned my back on the last-ever space shuttle launch.

But 60 seconds wasn’t nearly enough time for this starry-eyed applicant.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: , , , ,
Posted in Travel, Video | 4 comments »

The Nerdiest Marriage Proposal. Ever.

July 16th, 2011
By Dave Mosher

Yesterday, months of planning culminated into the world’s nerdiest marriage proposal.

I asked Kendra Snyder to marry me in the opened-up guts of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. (Where Kendra works as a science writer/communicator/public information officer-type.)

More specifically, I asked her on scaffolding below the center of RHIC’s 1,200-ton STAR detector. This house-sized machine examines the hot soup of energy present just moments after the Big Bang, which physicists recreate by colliding gold ions near the speed of light.

Make as many symbolic interpretations as you’d like — I chose the location for a lot of reasons! — but the truth is I wanted us to have a great story to tell. A ridiculously nerdy, epic and smile-prompting story.

So how did things go down? Here’s the skinny from each of our perspectives.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: , , , , ,
Posted in Announcements, Physics, Video | 25 comments »

Not Live, From Cape Canaveral

July 9th, 2011
By Dave Mosher

CAPE CANAVERAL – While covering the final space shuttle mission, I thought it’d be interesting to show the place where reporting of some incredible history has taken place.

I wanted to post this prior to launch, so it’s a day late (and a few thousand dollars in production value short). Fast-forward to the end for the launch from the press mound.

Filed under: , , , ,
Posted in Space and Astronomy, Video | 1 comment »

Ready for orders at the final space shuttle launch

July 5th, 2011
By Dave Mosher

This is it, folks. The final space shuttle launch is upon us.

The glorified freight truck Atlantis launches Friday, July 8 at 11:26 a.m. EDT, and four lucky astronauts are hitching a ride. Once the crew gets up to a speed of about 17,500 mph — fast enough to keep them in continuous free fall — they’ll tag up with the International Space Station, perform a bread-and-butter mission, and coast back to Earth a couple weeks later.

I’m now a stone’s throw away from Kennedy Space Center* and parachuting into one of the geekiest and longest-lived reporting heritages on Earth, along with a veritable circus of other news media types.

My aim in this is simple: To document the end of a significant and contentious phase of human history. But I want to crowdsource the effort a bit.

I have a camera, a camcorder and my furious writing fingers. What would you have me do with these tools? Sky’s (not) the limit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: ,
Posted in Space and Astronomy, Travel | Be the first to comment »

Does aging stop?

June 6th, 2011
By Dave Mosher

One scientist thinks so.

Aging and getting old are not the same process, and some of us can deliberately freeze the former during our 40s, 50s or 60s.

This is an idea put forth by Michael Rose of the University California, Irvine — a guy who creates freakishly long-lived “Methuselah” fruit flies for his day job.

Rose joined the stage at the World Science Festival* in New York City with three other gerontological experts: Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Foundation, Judith Campisi of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Leonard Guarente of MIT.

Local TV-news legend Bill Ritter moderated the June 2nd chat, called “From Dust to…: The Radical New Science of Longevity.”

The dance of question-and-answer proceeded normally until about halfway through, when Rose dropped a figurative bomb.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: , , , , , ,
Posted in Events, Life | Be the first to comment »

Welcome to the jungle

May 8th, 2011
By Dave Mosher

The oft-heard quip about digital cameras is that they never run out of film. Truth. They use solid-state flash memory.

My problem with the witticism, however, is that it implies flash memory can store more photos than anyone could possibly take. Whoever said this never went to Costa Rica.

This tropical slice of Central America offers some of the richest wildlife and most beautiful scenery in the world crammed into 50,000ish square kilometers.

I’m talking about sweeping river basins riddled with rapids, cloud forests lit up with howler monkey calls, beaches invaded by monkeys and crab racoons, lush jungle cocoa plantations, epic waterfalls, and more.

Costa Rica also offers bewildering glimpses into ways of life that are foreign to U.S. citizens like myself. Unattended piles of burning trash, machete-wielding pineapple-harvesting bicyclists, mothers rolling babies down busy country-like roads, over-tanned ex-pat bed-and-breakfast owners, and sanctuaries filled with lumbering sloths, to name a few.

I snapped more than a thousand photos during the March 2011 trip with Kendra and our friends, ultimately filling up a 16-gigabyte card twice over. Below are some favorite shots that survived the delete button.

Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: , , ,
Posted in Photography, Travel | Be the first to comment »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »