Driverless cars: an economic problem.
Another one for the unintended consequences file? From Slashdot (not normally a research reporting resource, but bear with us) we hear a note of concern […]
Articles by grant
We’ve sent these germs to Mars.
And now, Nature says, we know the names of the interplanetary stowaways: Swabs of Curiosity’s surfaces before it was launched, including its heat shield and […]
E-cigarettes not really that much better than the non-e variety.
Science Daily pokes a hole in the optimism around electronic cigarettes with findings that they’re really not that different from the kind you light and […]
Science Art: Inside a Bernal Sphere Colony, by Rick Guidice/NASA Ames Research Center
In the 1970s, NASA hired some artists to visualize life in three kinds of space colonies. Here, we’ve got a Bernal Sphere, a “point design […]
Want to make strong fibers? Use knots!
Laboratory Equipment points out that simple solutions can have bigger effects than you’d imagine, when it comes to the raw material we’re making things out […]
A robot that can catch.
Robots are still, on the whole, kind of slow responders. The big breakthrough a couple of years ago with Big Dog was that it could […]
What’s that a fossil of? Oh, just giant sperm.
PbysOrg looks back into the distant past, when tiny shrimp left behind sperm longer than their bodies: The giant sperm are thought to have been […]
One of our submarines is missing.
Actually, gone. Imploded. BBC has more on the tragic end of the deep-sea submersible Nereus: The robotic vehicle Nereus went missing while exploring one of […]
It really is the nicotine-based pesticide that’s killing all the bees.
The Guardian (with a little help from Harvard) confirms what folks have suspected for a while – that Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is largely due […]
Science Art: Le Monde Primitif, by Adolphe-Franois Pannemaker, 1857.
Click to embiggen This eerie vision of an alien, ancient world greeted those who opened the front cover of W.F.A. Zimmerman’s Le monde avant la […]
Civilization has vegetarian roots.
At least, Laboratory Equipment says, in ancient Egypt. A new study of carbon-levels in mummies has found that until recently, when people settled down to […]
A $50 home-printed hand beats a $42,000 prosthetic.
Washington Post explores the friendship between Jeremy Simon, a 3D-printer “tinkerer” and Jose Delgado, a 53-year-old man who was born without a hand… and who […]
I really don’t know what I’m saying.
Nature reveals that sometimes our mouths really do move faster than our brains: But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that […]
The walled city of New York… after the oceans rise.
Scientific American paints a peculiar picture of the Big Apple’s future, with the hustle and bustle taking place behind a series of levees, walls and […]
A viral aphrodisiac. Like, literally – a virus that makes sexytime happen. Then it kills you….
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), as NPR reports, it only affects crickets. They get infected, then want to have more sex, spreading the virus to more […]