As I was mindlessly perusing my facebook feed this week, I came across a bikini-clad Kate Upton floating weightless in microgravity. She was doing a photoshoot for Sports Illustrated and she looked marvelous, as always. [Insert recycled joke about body “literally defying gravity” - which was likely in the pitch to do the shoot in the first place]. A tip of the hat to ZeroG, because they are getting some great publicity out of this.

While this didn't actually take place in outer space, it’s definitely space-related, and it is part of the increasing trend of space and science news showing up from nontraditional outlets. I'm talking about everything from Bill Nye debating creationists and climate change-deniers, to Richard Branson’s suborbital flights for rich people, to the educational yet pithy posts from the "I Fucking Love Science" facebook page.

These are things that my friends who aren't trained as scientists or engineers are posting about. These are things that regular people find interesting and worth sharing.

But this hasn't always been the case. What changed? Why are science topics no longer something that only PhDs actively participate in and find intrinsically interesting? I believe there are three main reasons why this has happened.

1. Technical Information Has Been Democratized