Leap Second: Why June 30th, 2015 Will be a Long Day

I presume that you know what a leap year is.  A year is the amount of time the Earth takes to orbit the Sun, and is measured as 365 days, or 365 rotations of Earth.  It is, in reality, a little bit longer.  Each orbit of the Sun takes 365.25 days, or 365 days and six hours.  So what do we do with that six hours? We ignore it for 3 years.  On the fourth year we add up those extra hours and we get 24 hours, an extra day! So we add in February 29th every four years. This...

Volcanoes on the ‘Home World of Women’

Woman got the worse deal when author John Gray wrote a book titled ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.’  The point he was clearly making was about the communication issues between the sexes, but men definitely got the better deal in home worlds.  For one, Mars is kind of cold, has polar ice caps, is covered in rust and dust, has been pretty dead inside for millions of years, and is bombarded with radiation from the Sun (you can draw your own parallels to men yourself).  But Venus, with its 400 degree Celsius temperature, sulphuric acid rain, incredibly...