Posts by 

Deborah Byrd

How did zebras get their stripes?

The exquisite stripes on zebras have been explained in many ways. A recent explanation involves blood-sucking horseflies.

Mississippi river well below normal in 2012

Two space images of the Mississippi River - one from August 2012 and the other from August 2011. You can see that the riverbed is drier in 2012.

Curiosity will make a detour to first destination

The Curiosity rover will first travel 400 meters east-southeast of its landing site to Glenelg, where three types of Martian terrain intersect.

A lonely galactic island

DDO 190 is a dwarf irregular galaxy, lying some 3 million light-years from any other galaxy in space. It's a lonely galactic island on a sea of empty space.

Curiosity rover’s self-portrait on Mars

Have you seen the Mars rover Curiosity's self-portrait yet? It's amazing.

Galaxies: Are they different from each other?

Meet 9 individual galaxies, as various as snowflakes, and contemplate the variety of the billions of galaxies in our universe.

Curiosity rover coolest images of Mars so far

Here are my favorite images of Curiosity - or from Curiosity - taken in the 10 days since the Mars rover landed on the Red Planet's surface on August 5-6, 2012.

ALMA telescope: World’s biggest astronomy project

What better goal for the world's biggest telescope - the ALMA telescope - than to probe details of how stars like our sun and planets like Earth came to be?

Video: A flight through the universe

Prepare for warp speed as you watch this video of a flight through the universe.

Earthquake strikes in ocean north of Japan

A very strong 7.7-magnitude earthquake struck in the deep ocean east of Russia and north of Japan. No injuries or casualties reported. No tsunami warning.