By Terry Poulos, special to the Hellenic News of America
40th ANNIV CHALLENGER EXPLOSION: As Odysseus knew well, the winds of fate bring fickle funnels. Longtime Northwest Indiana 4th grade teacher Gregory Karas was blessed with a fate that saved his life. The Valparaiso, IN native was a semi-finalist in a national competition to be the teacher selected to join astronauts manning the 1986 NASA space shuttle Challenger, an assignment of a lifetime. But Poseidon’s winds shifted to a different teacher, Christa McAulliffe. Disaster struck when an explosion claimed the lives of all
souls aboard. This year, Challenger’s 40th anniversary, Karas reflects on that fateful day and the hypotheticals of what might have been. In late January, he recounted those moments in an interview with ABC7 Chicago, which was covering a lecture he gave to elementary school students in Lemont, IL. Karas today is Flight Director of Challenger Learning Center in Hammond, IN, a science education institution, and founder of North Pole Publishing, a children’s imprint focusing on Christmas-related tomes. With renewed purpose, every day might be considered a type of Karas-mas in his household, having been spared Challenger’s demise. Perhaps he was endowed with the blessings of a higher pursuit to educate generations to come on the wonders of science and nature right here on Earth, and to publish literature on yet another grand pilot of the skies, good ole’ Saint Nick.
THRICE WISE: More winds, the stellar variety. Three Greek researchers – as in Hermes Trismegistus (Thrice Wise) – are divining the secrets of neutron star electrodynamics. Dimitrios Skiathas, Constantinos Kalopotharakos, and Demosthenes Kazanas were among six co-authors of findings published last November in The Astrophysical Journal. The title: “Magnetosphere Evolution and Precursor-driven Electromagnetic Signals in Merging Binary Neutron Stars.” Lead author Skiathas, a grad student at the University of Patras who’s conducting research at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, told Phys.org, “We studied the last several orbits before the merger, when the entwined magnetic fields undergo rapid and dramatic changes, and modeled potentially observable high-energy signals.” The team used the Pleiades supercomputer at NASA’s Ames Research Center to compute various scenarios. “In our simulations, the magnetosphere behaves like a magnetic circuit that continually rewires itself as the stars orbit,” co-author Kalapotharakos of Goddard told Phys.org. “Field lines connect, break, and reconnect while currents surge through plasma moving at nearly the speed of light, and the rapidly varying fields can accelerate particles.” Kazanas, also based at Goddard, was quoted saying, “Such behavior could be imprinted on gravitational wave signals that would be detectable in next-generation facilities”…Side note: Avid followers of the Hellenic News may recall the newspaper is affiliated with the annual Hermes Expo trade show (being held April 29 in New Jersey). The expo is named for ancient Greek demigod Hermes Trismegistus, revered for alchemy, astrology and divine wisdom.
TAMING REENTRY CHAOS: Commercial satellites are being launched at an accelerating pace and safety experts warn of potential dangers. A paper published December 10 in Science titled “Reentry and disintegration dynamics of space debris tracked using seismic data” was co-authored by Constantinos Charalambous of the Imperial College of London. The researchers aim to better monitor “uncontrolled reentries” to “track and, in case of toxic fallout, quickly mitigate.”
TIME AND FORBES LISTS: Time magazine named various architects of artificial intelligence as its 2025 quote “person of the year.” Among them, Google’s head of AI Demis Hassabis, a Greek Cypriot in the UK. Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel for chemistry after Google’s Alpha Go supercomputer successfully helped map human protein folding. Additionally, Forbes named private space flight pioneer, X-Prize founder Dr. Peter H. Diamandis of Santa Monica, CA as one of its top 250 greatest innovators in America. Diamandis of late has turned his attention to the science of longevity.
ARCHIMEDES SCREW REPURPOSED: A paper published in the December issue of Nature Nanotechnology titled “Geometry-induced spin chirality in a non-chiral ferromagnet at zero field” brings an ancient Greek invention to bear on modern science. Chiral refers to handedness (right or left) and in physics it is often used to describe spin. In this case, the concept of the Archimedean screw, an invention of legendary polymath inventor Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 275-205 BCE). The screw is also still employed in modern wastewater treatment facilities.
FRAPPE REX: Frappe lovers, rev up your happy rebetika. We’re prescribing three cups daily! NBC News in February detailed a new study led by New York-based neurologist Dr. Kellyann Neotis which provided strong evidence that drinking two-to-three cups daily of caffeinated coffee or tea helps keep dementia away.
SCI-BITS: The Greek Scientists Society, a growing LinkedIn group founded by Theo Zacharis, is hosting a virtual networking meeting February 27. Zacharis is also Executive Director at Kinesis Innovation Center, and Innovation and Strategy Advisor at bioGLOT Ventures in the UK…In February, Fast Company ran a piece titled, “To sell your ideas, you need to master these three types of power” – ethos, pathos, logos… Quanta magazine, one of the leading online science zines, last year launched a book publishing arm, Quanta Books, and along with it a newsletter titled “Philomath,” which Quanta explained as “loving to learn” or “lover of learning” in ancient Greek… Veteran TV development producer Valerie Gobos from Los Angeles has been shopping around a new “sonic animation family sci-fi” drama series created by Chris McHale and Studio Jijii…A cutting-edge synchrotron radiation method was applied to a heretofore unreadable palimpsest text ascribed to ancient Greek astronomer, geographer and mathematician Hippacarus of Rhodes (c: 190-120 BCE) that revealed an ancient star map hidden beneath other symbols and writing. Findings were posted January 30 in Scientific American…Three decades ago, mathematician Paul Erdős (not Greek) posed a riddle that eluded the world’s greatest minds. Until now. In November, the Aristotle AI program, created by Harmonic, solved it in six hours. The ancient Greeks were first to build a computer (Antikythera Mechanism) and automatons (machines that operate like robots). Those seeds are bearing fruit today.
Terry Poulos is a writer, artist, and fractal geometer whose inquisitions focus on theoretical physics, mathematics, ancient and modern technology and archaeology. His art and musings can be found at Scientiquity.com and Scientiquity.medium.com
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