How easy is it for you to cheer up your partner, make her smile, and bring out her greatest strengths using just your words? In this post, we’ll cover eleven of the most encouraging phrases you can use to make this birth experience a memorable one. You will know exactly what to say to a woman in labor. You can breathe easy. Because it will be easier than you think – and you will love how it feels when you can provide safety, encouragement, and make your partner feel capable, just by what you say. But remember, words are powerful,…
Author: t1205
Desiree Fortin, mother of triplets, shares her heartfelt story of overcoming infertility. Anyone who sees the photo above cannot imagine Desiree Fortin’s journey to finally carry her three precious babies in her arms. In a letter to infertility published in Love What Matters, the mother recalls the struggle to fulfill her dream of becoming a mother. “Dear Infertility, I hated you. You steal dreams. You break hearts. You bring grief. You consume lives. You are the reason I couldn’t get pregnant on my own. You have sunk my heart into pure anguish at not being able to parent like most…
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Mars has a “dust problem.” The surface of the Red Planet is covered in particulate matter consisting of tiny bits of silica and oxidized minerals. During a Martian summer in the southern hemisphere, the planet experiences dust storms that can grow to encompass the entire planet. At other times of the year, dust devils and dusty skies are a persistent problem. This hazard has claimed robotic explorers that rely on solar panels to charge their batteries, like NASA’s Opportunity rover and the InSight lander, which ended their missions in 2018 and 2022, respectively. Martian…
Black holes swallow everything—including light—which explains why we can’t see them. But we can observe their immediate surroundings and learn about them. And when they’re on a feeding binge, their surroundings become even more luminous and observable. This increased luminosity allowed astronomers to find a black hole that was feasting on material only 800 million years after the Universe began. Even with everything astrophysicists have learned, black holes are still mysterious. We know that the largest ones—supermassive black holes (SMBH)—reside in the centers of galaxies like the Milky Way. But the history of their formation, growth, and evolution is still…
MSL Curiosity is going about its business exploring Mars. The high-tech rover is currently exploring the sulphate-bearing unit on Mt. Sharp, the central peak in Mars’ Gale Crater. Serendipity placed a metal meteorite in its path. The meteorite is made mostly of nickel and iron, and it has a name: Cacao. (Chocolate comes from cacao.) Cacao isn’t very large; it’s only about 30 cm (1 ft.) across. Curiosity has come across several meteorites since landing in Gale Crater in August 2012. Cacao stands out visually from its surroundings. While the Martian surface is red from oxides, the meteorite is dark…
Simulations of the formation of the solar system have been largely successful. They are able to replicate the positions of all the major planets along with their orbital parameters. But current simulations have an extreme amount of difficulty getting the masses of the four terrestrial planets right, especially Mercury. A new study suggests that we need to pay more attention to the giant planets in order to understand the evolution of the smaller ones. Of all the rocky inner planets of the solar system, Mercury is the strangest. Not only does it have the lowest mass, but compared to its…
If you want to know where you are in space, you’d better bring along a map. But it’s a little more complicated than riding shotgun on a family road trip. Spacecraft navigation beyond Earth orbit is usually carried out by mission control. A series of radio communication arrays across the planet, known as the Deep Space Network, allows operators to check in with space probes and update their navigational status. The system works, but it could be better. What if a spacecraft could autonomously determine its position, without needing to phone home? That’s been a dream of aerospace engineers for…
The James Webb Space Telescope is back to full science operations. One of the telescope’s instruments, the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) had been offline since January 15 due to a communications error. But engineers worked through the problem and were able to return the instrument to full operations. “NASA and CSA [Canadian Space Agency] partnered to approach the problem as technically possible, using a detailed consideration of all areas of operation of the instrument,” said Julie Van Campen, Webb Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM) systems engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in a blog post update.…
The European Space Agency successfully tested a solar-sail-type device to speed up the deorbit time for a used cubesat carrier in Earth orbit. The so-called breaking sail, the Drag Augmentation Deorbiting System (ADEO) was deployed from an ION satellite carrier in late December 2022. Engineers estimate the sail will reduce the time it takes for the carrier to reenter Earth’s atmosphere from 4-5 years to approximately 15 months. The sail is one of many ideas and efforts to reduce space junk in Earth orbit. “We want to establish a zero debris policy, which means if you bring a spacecraft into…
The universe was simply different when it was younger. Recently astronomers have discovered that complex physics in the young cosmos may have led to the development of supermassive stars, each one weighing up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun. We currently have no observations of the formation of the first stars in the universe, which is thought to have taken place when our cosmos was only a few hundred million years old. To understand this important epoch, astronomers turn to sophisticated computer simulations to test out models of how the first stars formed. Over the years astronomers have…
The differences between Earth and Venus are obvious to us. One is radiant with life and adorned with glittering seas, and the other is a scorching, glowering hellhole, its volcanic surface shrouded by thick clouds and visible only with radar. But the difference wasn’t always clear. In fact, we used to call Venus Earth’s sister planet. Can astronomers tell exo-Earths and exo-Venuses apart from a great distance? There are lots of terrestrial planets in the habitable zones of distant suns. Sometimes they’re described as “Earth-like” just for being rocky and at the right distance from the star. But with scant…
Straight out of a Sci-fi movie with popcorn jammed in it’s mouth is this drone type craft hovering and flying over Milton Keynes in the UK. Hold on to your eyeballs because I’m taking them for a spin. Get a good look at this UFO – it’s a green laser for sure, but there’s a UFO near it, the green laser has a round ball on it’s upper part… That’s worth looking into. Take the fact that the eye witness states that this is a drone, it’s a funny way to describe what you think is a UFO, don’t you…