Hi English-language readers! This blog post is not for you; perhaps you’d like a hat instead? No? Well, when last we spoke of creating non-English versions of Stack Overflow, some of you were certain we should’ve gone the easy route and just leveraged a machine translation service instead of creating real sites for real people to use. I humbly invite you to read the rest of this post using the mechanical babelfish of your choice, and see if you think such tools can be relied on for important work… …

 Title: New NIR light-curve templates for classical Cepheids Authors: L. Inno et al. Institution of First Author: Department of Physics, University of Rome Tor Vergata The Cosmic Distance Ladder Distance is a tricky thing to measure in astronomy. We can’t use tape measures or rulers, and even more sophisticated methods like laser ranging are only good […]

From the International Space Station, Expedition 42 Flight Engineer Terry W. Virts took this photograph of the Gulf of Mexico and U.S. Gulf Coast at sunset and posted it to social media on Dec. 14, 2014. The space station and its crew orbit Earth from an altitude of 220 miles, traveling at a speed of approximately 17,500 miles per hour. Because the station completes each trip around the globe …