This is not an easy question to answer. First of all, you can’t just make cookie dough on the International Space Station (ISS) because flour and sugar in zero gravity would just float around and not stay in the bowl.

There would also be baking challenges. On Earth, the hot air in an oven moves around and heats the dough. This doesn’t happen in zero gravity. Likewise, gravity makes the cookies spread out and flatten, so a cookie in space would look different without a lot of baking changes.

Last November, these issues were tested. A tin of DoubleTree (the hotel) cookie dough and a zero-gravity oven were used on the ISS to bake cookies. (Here is a short video about what the oven looks like.) It was an interesting experiment.

First of all, they baked five cookies, one at a time. Each one was cooked at a different time and temperature. The first one was undercooked; the other four smelled like baked cookies. Unfortunately, the astronauts couldn’t eat the cookies. They were put in individual containers and sent back to Earth for testing.

Here is the answer to our opening question. The cookies on the ISS were baked between 70 and 130 minutes at 300 and 325 degrees. The best looking cookies were numbers 4 and 5 that baked for 120 and 130 minutes. Two hours!!!

This may seem like a frivolous experiment, but if we are going to have colonies on the Moon and Mars, it will help to have real food, including cookies. Plus, a fresh-baked cookie is better then one that’s been in a box for months, especially if you have a bag of milk with a straw to go with it.

When I read the heading “Dinosaurs Lived On the Other Side Of the Galaxy,” I assumed it was clickbait nonsense. But then I noticed that it was sent by IFLScience!, so I delved deeper. This heading is both true and misleading, which I suppose is why it works.

Dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy because it takes the Earth 230 million years to orbit our galaxy center. During the age of the dinosaurs, the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy from where it is now.

That is very cool and also very normal. If I go back 115 million years ago from today (when the Earth was opposite where it is now), we end up in the Early Cretaceous, during the age of the dinosaurs. If we go back another 230 million years, another time when the Earth was on the other side of the galaxy, we reach the Carboniferous. We could say that two-foot-long dragonflies lived on the other side of the galaxy.

If we do another rotation, we end up in the Cambrian, when trilobites lived on the other side of the galaxy.

So you see, dinosaurs were not the point of this article, just a sneaky way to get us to learn something. We now know that the Earth (and our entire solar system) rotates the galaxy center in around 230 million years. That’s really cool, but then so are giant dragonflies and trilobites.

The days have been sunny and bright, yet quite chilly. We haven’t been out of the fifties for the last few days.

I haven’t adjusted to jackets yet, so I’m layering t-shirts and sweatshirts. Just right during the day, but I feel a bit cold in the morning and evening.

Instead of complaining (or putting on a jacket,) I decided to research the coldest places on the earth and in the solar system. Perhaps I can convince myself that it isn’t cold here yet.

Fairbanks, Alaska is the coldest city in the United States. It averages -16F in the winter. That’s cold, but it also holds the record for the coldest city in the U.S. ever when it reached -66F. I visited my aunt and uncle in Fairbanks last August. I thought I could live there, but now I wonder.

The coldest place on Earth is at the Vostok Station in Antarctica. On July 21, 1983, the temperature was measured at -128F. Wow!

The coldest spot recorded in the solar system (not counting space itself) is nearby. It’s on the moon. The temperature of the permanently shadowed crater at the moon’s south pole was found to be -397F, That’s colder than Pluto!

See, cold is relative. I think it’s cold out, but it’s not in negative numbers, so we’re barely cool. Cool!