The dusty hematite plains of Mars, as seen by the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

This is, more or less, the place where Opportunity found evidence of water.

Behold the mighty propaganda of a mighty space agency!

NASA’s (computer generated) video of the very big (notional) Ares V rocket, launching a Very Large Telescope (that’s its official name) into orbit:

You can read more about the Ares and Project Constellation on Wikipedia. The Ares will be a new generation of rockets designed to take people and cargo [...]

We’re all worried about the sudden destruction of planet Earth and every living thing upon it by a sudden, cataclysmic collision with a hurtling mass of space rock. Aren’t we? Well, New Scientist is taking a long, hard look in the mirror and telling us it’ll all be alright:

[R]esearchers led by Massimiliano Vasile of [...]

You might remember reading, a few years ago, about some controversial claims made by Dr. Michael Persinger, who was researching how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) – putting really strong magnets over specific areas of people’s brains – could create different sensory experiences. Including, he said, the experience of being in the same room with God (or the Higher Power [...]

Feeling pressed for time? A New Scientist interview reported by the Telegraph posits that we have more time than you think:

Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history [...]

So James Lovelock, he of the Gaia Hypothesis, has come up with a novel way to beat global warming – using little jellyfish-like creatures called “salps” to, more or less, terraform our own planet. He’s was working with Chris Rapley of the Science Museum in London to design a scheme to grow colonies of salps in the tropical [...]

See more space walks (or, erm, space “surfs”) at NASA (of course), at a site belonging to someone named “Texas Jim” (showing Endeavour over Hurricane Dean) and at the mighty Fogonazos, which includes McCandless’ historic jet-pack-assisted free float – an untethered ride into orbit.

Rugby players will have one more reason to sneer at American football players, if ABC News is right about this new football helmet. It doesn’t just protect players’ heads. It analyzes injuries by sensing the angle and magnitude of blows:

“The whole point of this technology is to measure the severity and location of head impacts, especially those that [...]

The idea that humans can somehow be unconsciously yanked around by pheromones – invisible, odorless, airborne chemicals – tends to make a lot of scientists guffaw and back away defensively. Lower animals? Sure, they can get influenced by these chemical traces! But not we mighty big-brained humans! We don’t even have a mating season! Except, as an experiment published in [...]