Farewell, Spitzer telescope?
Nature covers the hard decisions that NASA faces in its latest budget… which may include shutting down a great space telescope (and an asteroid watchdog) […]
Science
Watching the Earth breathe… again.
Scientific American watches NASA launch another satellite to watch the way our planet breathes: But since [David Crisp] first conceived the project nearly 15 years […]
Ant colonies are smarter than Google.
When it comes to finding new information, The Independent reports, those crazy, criss-crossing paths that ants take are more efficient than Google at processing new […]
Science Art: Linear Motor Velocity Detection Apparatus, by James L. Johnson and Harold C. Stephens, 1969
From IBM’s patent 3470399, a device to tell how fast an electric motor is running by detecting its magnetic field.
Thinking insects
Science Daily peeks into the mind of insects with new research that shows that fruit flies think before they act: In experiments asking fruit flies […]
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 […]
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 […]