Endgadgets prepares us for robot dominance of the skies by 2047:

In its recently released “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047″ report, the US Air Force details a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The Air Force says that increasingly, humans will [...]

New Scientist reacquaints us with the smell of fear:

Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, a cognitive neuroscientist at Stony Brook University in New York and colleagues collected sweat from the armpits of first-time tandem skydivers as they hurtled towards the earth.

The smell of their sweat was wafted under the noses of volunteers as they lay in an fMRI scanner. Even though they [...]

Health Day News reports on a new neuroscience project from Brigham Young University demonstrating the emotional wisdoms of infants. They’ve shown that babies, like Dr. Dolittle, know the language of dogs:

The researchers believe that they can glean whether a baby is making a connection between two things by monitoring how long they look at a picture. In this [...]

Scientific American really does incur a sense of wonder and mystery sometimes. Here’s a group of scientists who have turned a bunch of stem cells into a living mouse:

Xiao Xiao, as the rodent is called in its native Chinese, was one of dozens created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) and born to a surrogate mother. …

Researchers [...]

Der Spiegel is sounding the call – psychedelics are coming back to the lab… and helping people heal:

“I would welcome it if it were easier to use psychoactive substances in therapy,” says Rolf Verres, medical director of the Department of Medical Psychology at the University of Heidelberg Hospital. “In Germany, there is simply a deficit in this respect.”

Elsewhere, however, [...]

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This is a Saturn V rocket, the largest, heaviest vehicle ever to hurl itself from our small ball of mud into the vastness of space.

At the time the photographer is snapping this photograph on a hot Central Florida summer day, there are three human beings inside its nose. They are about to go to the moon. [...]

New Scientist’s “Short Sharp Science” blog is not very hopeful about the rocket that’s supposed to take us to Mars. Apparently, there was an oversight in the safety systems around the Orion (the space capsule with the people inside) and the Ares rocket’s big, explosive Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs):

If the accident occurred during the time of high wind blast [...]

I can’t figure out why something like this wouldn’t have survived pretty much anything. National Geographic reports on the discovery of an armored, omnivorous, desert-dwelling armadillo-crocodile:

Dubbed Armadillosuchus arrudai, the newly described species of crocodile roamed the arid interior of Brazil about 90 million years ago, during the late Cretaceous period, scientists said.

…

And “the strangeness did not stop [...]

SONG: “Like Salamanders Do” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: “Regenerated legs no big trick for salamanders”, Reuters, 1 July 2009, as used in the post “If salamanders can do it….”

ABSTRACT:
If someone was to walk up to me and offer to replace any body part of mine with a new [...]