Space, science, and the human mind. Since 1995.
Life Signs
A Space Daily column

Life Signs

Nature and earth science

Life Signs is where Space Daily looks down instead of up. Animals, ecosystems, and Earth science, with a bias for peer-reviewed studies over press-release hype. The living world turns out to be at least as strange as anything in orbit.

Earth News

In 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried a 35mm motion picture camera to an altitude of 105 kilometres, and the grainy black-and-white frames it brought back became the first photographs of Earth taken from space — years before the camera’s own engineers had a name for the boundary it had crossed.

{"content":"On October 24, 1946, a 35mm DeVry motion picture camera bolted into the nose of a captured German V-2 rocket clicked through a single frame every second-and-a-half as the missile arced

Climate Science

The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, the largest documented volcanic eruption in human history, killed approximately 90,000 people directly and produced the year without a summer in 1816, a climate disruption that caused famine across the Northern Hemisphere, may have triggered the first global cholera pandemic, and produced the cold dark summer at Lake Geneva during which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein

On the evening of 5 April 1815, the residents of Java and surrounding Indonesian islands heard what they believed were cannon shots in the distance.