Wired Science

This is a story from my class. The course is a physics course designed for elementary education majors. Really, it’s a great course using a great curriculum – Physics and Everyday Thinking. The basic idea is that students work in …

Scientists speculate two factors may influence why some animal species are smarter than others: the foraging behavior of a species (for instance, how cognitively demanding it is for the animals to obtain food) and the social complexity of the animals’ …

Now that the shutdown is finally over, we can look forward to new images from the NASA Earth Observatory. I had originally started this post to fill in some of the time that we’ve been without the EO, but even …

We’re now on the 16th day of the federal shutdown. As I write, the Senate has announced a deal to avoid a debt default and open the government. It remains to be seen whether that will work, or how fast. …

Every now and then, you stumble across something simply wonderful on the Internet. You find a gem that requires bringing it to others’ attention. That’s what happened with me recently when I was reading the website of the late computer …

It doesn’t seem like such a difficult question, but it always brings up great discussions. If you drop a heavy object and a low mass object from the same height at the same time, which will hit the ground first? …

In 1966, two engineers looked at the factors governing piloted Mars mission plans. Besides orbital mechanics and the solar cycle, they also looked at NASA’s budget and presidential politics. Beyond Apollo blogger and space historian David S. F. Portree describes …

This is a follow-up to my post over the weekend on the #StandingwithDNLee situation that enveloped Danielle N. Lee, Ph.D., her blog at Scientific American, SciAm’s partner organizations, and — by extension — the many thousands of people who expressed …

When Peter Bellerby began searching for a globe for his father’s 80th birthday present, he had no idea he’d end up making globes himself. Five years ago, the Londoner was running a successful bowling alley business, but after realizing that …

A parasitic worm moves into a guy’s mouth; the guy is a biology professor. What does he do next? Wired Science blogger Deborah Blum has all the details.

When it comes to animal models of human speech, songbirds are the gold standard. And then there’s the Brazilian free-tailed bat — a mammal that sings like a bird, and has different songs for different occasions.

A sudden eruption at New Zealand’s White Island highlights the danger of dropping tourists into the crater for daytime sight-seeing.

Most people see this video of the SpaceX Grasshopper on a test flight and point to the funny stampeding cows. Yes, that’s funny but that’s not what I see. Instead, I see a great video example that can be used …

On Friday, the news network Al Jazeera made an announcement:  the British medical journal, The Lancet, was now supporting the theory that the deceased Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, had died of polonium-210 poisoning. According to the report, independent scientists had reviewed earlier …

A couple of unpleasant and deeply dismaying things have happened in the science blogosphere in the past 36 hours or so. I’m posting on it, along with a growing number of other science bloggers, in order to stand in solidarity …

Professional cartographers gnash their teeth when a badly made map goes viral. At a meeting this week, one cartographer listed the qualities of viral maps and challenged his colleagues to think about whether it’s possible to make them without compromising …

The U.S. government shutdown now means that Antarctic research programs are being suspended. The repercussions of missing a field season at the South Pole will be global, and devastating.

It’s been a year since Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a balloon at the edge of space. To celebrate, Red Bull and RDIO will host a new documentary Mission to the Edge of Space: The Inside Story of Red Bull …

Dear readers, During the intense period of DIY space suit testing this summer – when Cameron Smith and John Haslett were here in Copenhagen – we performed a bunch of interesting tests. Most of the tests were thoroughly described in …

In 1976-1978, an unusually detailed Purdue University student project caught the eyes of NASA, the British Interplanetary Society, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The students designed a spacecraft that would collect a 50-meter-long ice core from Mars’s south pole ice …