Science

453 articles on Science

• Hubble Captures Violent Birth Pangs of Enormous Star
  NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a young star undergoing violent birth.
  12.15.11

• Report: Harmful Chimpanzee Research Not Worth the Pain
  Human ingenuity and compassion have prevailed in an Institute of Medicine declaration that invasive medical experiments on chimpanzees are largely unnecessary.
  12.15.11

• Darpa: Use Tobacco to Save Soldiers From Nerve Gas
  Here's a new idea from Darpa to combat the convulsions, choking and diarrhea that come with a nerve-gas attack. The Pentagon's blue-sky researchers want to harvest ersatz human liver enzymes to increase immune-system resilience -- after, um, growing them inside tobacco plants.
  12.15.11

• NASA Builds Six-Foot Crossbow to Harpoon Comets
  Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center are working on a harpoon gun that can spear the heart of the comet, collect a sample of subsurface dirt in its tip and reel it back into the hovering craft.
  12.14.11

• Asteroid-Powered Geminid Meteor Shower Peaks Tonight
  One of the year's best meteor showers has to compete with a nearly full moon, but the show should still be pretty good no matter where you are.
  12.13.11

• 'Arms Race' Exists Between Snakes and Humans
  Most people assumed a one-way relationship of snakes occasionally harming people. New evidence suggests, however, that snakes being human prey, predator and competitor all at once is steering their evolution in some regions of the world.
  12.13.11

• Navy Gives Neck Injections A Shot At Curing PTSD
  A Chicago-area doc claims he can treat PTSD instantly, with a single injection to the neck. After five years trying to convince Pentagon doctors to give it a shot, they have -- and so far, Danger Room has learned, the Navy thinks his crazy-sounding approach is actually working.
  12.13.11

• Wrap-up of the 2011 AGU Fall Meeting
  Every time a scientific conference comes around I intend to blog about it, providing daily updates of all the great science to all of you. I always fail to do it. It's not so much about finding the time, but the energy -- these conferences simply drain my brain. At least this year I didn't ...
  12.12.11

• Accidents Happen -- It's Science!
  On Wednesday the news feeds and Twitter were all aflutter about the Mythbuster team's wild cannonball. Seems a test firing went awry during a shoot, and a 30-pound cannonball traveling 1,000 feet per second escaped the test site, struck a house 700 yards away, and continued straight through, coming to rest in a parked minivan. ...
  12.08.11

• NASA Rover Spots Unambiguous Evidence for Water on Ancient Mars
  NASA's Opportunity rover has seen a mineral on Mars that could only have formed in the presence of liquid water.
  12.07.11

• Blue Vampire Star Caught Sucking Red Giant's Gas
  Astronomers have captured the best-ever image of a greedy star sucking the gas away from its bloated, dying companion star.
  12.07.11

• Rainbow Map of Giant Asteroid Shows Planet-Like Features
  A rainbow-colored map of the asteroid Vesta, obtained by NASA's Dawn spacecraft, offers proof that the pumpkin-shaped rock is more like a terrestrial planet than most of its asteroid belt siblings.
  12.07.11

• Leaping Cockroach Gets Around on Spring-Loaded Knees
  A recently discovered South African cockroach leaps through the air like a missile, traversing nearly 50 times its body length with every hop.
  12.07.11

• Friday Field Photo #161: Lava Flow in Hawai'i
  This week's Friday Field Photo is from the southeast shore of the Big Island of Hawai'i and shows the lava-covered terrain on this active volcano. Note the darker and fresher lava flow that was making its way down the flank of the volcano towards the sea. As a sedimentary geologist I'm fascinated by the processes ...
  12.02.11

• Pro-Science Rapper's Shout Out for Evolution
  Baba Brinkman—dubbed the hip hop Richard Dawkins—is releasing music videos from his Rap Guide to Evolution album in hopes that teachers will punch up their science lectures.
  11.29.11

• Putting Scientists on Mars in Permanent Colonies
  Physicist Paul Davies explains that traveling to and subsisting on the Red Planet isn't the hard part—it's getting people home.
  11.29.11

• What Rocks: The Week's Best in the Geoblogosphere
  On most Mondays I pick five posts from the previous week in the geoscience blogosphere that caught my eye. I limit it to just five because I want those who are not already plugged into ...
  11.28.11

• Happy Birthday, Bill Nye!
  Consider the following: It's Bill Nye the Science Guy's birthday! Aside from hosting his fantastic 1993-1998 TV show (my daughter was born in 1997, so reruns and locally syndicated airings of Bill Nye the Science Guy were favorites around our house when she was little), Bill Nye: was a Boeing engineer who developed a hydraulic resonance suppressor ...
  11.27.11

• Forget Football -- Watch Some Punkin Chunkin Tonight
  While most may be happy to get their post-holiday meal physics lesson from the mock-gladiatorial combat represented by college or pro football, can we suggest something a little geekier? Tonight at 8:00pm Eastern/Pacific, 60% of the MythBusters (that's Kari, Grant, and Tory) will be hosting Punkin Chunkin on Science. Punkin Chunkin is the annual Delaware event ...
  11.24.11

• Making Arthur Christmas' Sci-Fi Sleigh
  The central question of Arthur Christmas is almost as old as the holiday itself: How does Santa do it -- for real? The film's answer involves gizmos, networking, a control room that looks like the future of NASA and a sleigh that could have soared out of Star Trek.
  11.22.11

• More MRSA Found In U.S. Retail Meat (Turkey, Too)
  Two new studies confirm, once again, that drug-resistant staph or MRSA -- normally thought of as a problem in hospitals -- is showing up in animals and in the meat those animals become. Superbug blogger Maryn McKenna weighs in.
  11.22.11

• Blame Your Crooked Teeth on Early Farmers
  The advent of farming may have led to a shortening and widening of the jaw, which in turn has resulted in crowding of the teeth.
  11.21.11

• Arthur Christmas and NASA Spinoffs
  Believe it or not, there is a great deal of NASA technology in your everyday life! This includes movie and entertainment technology. Now, in the 21st century, the business of Christmas and Santa Claus has gone hi-tech. The upcoming Sony Pictures Animation movie, Arthur Christmas, showcases a number of NASA enabled technology advancements used in ...
  11.21.11

• Darpa's New Tool for Diagnosing Disease? Semen
  Imagine if giving docs a single drop of semen was all it took to keep you healthy. In a solicitation released last week, Darpa, the Pentagon's far-out research agency, is asking for technology that'd replace good old diagnostic standbys -- a vial of blood or cup of urine, for example -- with "a portable format" that's about the size and weight of a credit card.
  11.21.11

• Running Out of Antibiotics: Europe Gets It
  In the United States, it's been "Get Smart About Antibiotics" Week this past week, an annual observance in which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and its medical and public health partners try to raise awareness of antibiotic resistance. The real action this week though was in Europe, where individual researchers and the EU's ...
  11.20.11

• Congress Looking to Declare Pizza Is a Vegetable for School Lunches
  The U.S. Congress is looking to vote on an appropriations bill that, among other things, will revise the guidelines set for federally-funded school lunch programs. In a move eerily similar to the "ketchup is a vegetable" rules in the '80s, the new guidelines will allow frozen pizzas to be classified as a vegetable when determining ...
  11.18.11

• Volcanoes Blamed for Greatest Land and Sea Extinctions
  The biggest volcanic eruptions of the past half eon had seemed a likely culprit in the greatest mass extinction Earth has seen -- both biotic cataclysm in the sea and on land.
  11.18.11