Bill Nye has been in the news lately as he redoubles his efforts to inform us that the world was in fact NOT created by an old bearded man in the sky. Meanwhile, NASA’s also managed to make positive headlines by distributing real time photos from the Mars landing of their Curiosity Rover. Therefore, now is the perfect time for these two to join forces to bring us a special live streaming YouTube event. It’s going down right here, right now. By the way, did we mention that it’s being broadcast from space?
Nye, NASA, and corporate sponsor Lenovo are teaming up with three teenage scientists who proposed experiments that could be performed aboard the space stations. 18 year old Amr Mohamed’s experiment involves exposing jumping spiders to space, while American high schoolers Dorothy Chen and Sara Ma have proposed testing the effects of space on a terrestrial virus. In my mind, the logical outcome to these experiments, which will presumably be overseen by Nye, is gigantic viral space spiders. Let’s hope I’m wrong.
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The whole event is being streamed on NASA’s Space Lab channel, live from the International Space Station. A complementary Twitter hashtag is being used to promote the event, which in my mind has two goals: showing off cool science stuff in space (always a hallmark of Nye’s old show) and raising awareness for NASA and astronomy worldwide (translation: give us money, please!)
In addition to his appearance on CNN, Nye also appeared in a video on the New York Times-run Big Think channel, in which is asserted that creationism is not right for children. Who knew that a fundamentalist hypothesis could be rated R? At any rate, it’s good to see one of my childhood icons continuing to make a name for himself. He’s been outspoken recently and the Space Lab live stream is just another step in the right direction. Not bad for a guy who’s apparently dead.
