Science

277 articles on Science

• Friday Field Photo #158: Looking over Glacier Grey in Patagonia
  This week's Friday Field Photo is for a friend of mine who is defending her Ph.D. dissertation today. I wish I could be there for it because I'm sure it's going to be great. Over the past five years, we've done some field work together and collaborated on papers related to the tectonic evolution of ...
  10.14.11

• Alt Text: How Science Can Become More Creepy
  I didn't know this two weeks ago, but it turns out the problem with science is that there aren't enough theories involving prehistoric narcissistic psychopathic art mollusks.
  10.14.11

• Philippe Starck: Evolution and Intelligent Design (No, Not That Kind ...)
  As we have evolved, we super-monkeys have continually posed ourselves the same question. How can we become better, more intelligent?
  10.12.11

• Evolutionary Comparison Finds Shocking History for Vertebrates
  Evolutionary biologists from Cornell University have discovered that just about every vertebrate on Earth descended from an ancient ancestor with a sixth sense: the ability to detect electrical fields in water.
  10.12.11

• Bobo Explores Light Will Illuminate Your iPad Learning
  Say hello to Bobo, your kid's new best friend! Well, maybe not quite, but he is the star of a new iPad app out now from developers GameCollage, which they'll definitely love. Bobo is a cute little robot who is both your guide and fellow adventurer as you explore various aspects of one of science's ...
  10.12.11

• Entering This Contest Could Put Your Science Experiment in Space
  If you're a student between the ages of 14-18, you are eligible to enter a new contest announced this week, called Space Lab. The competition, sponsored by YouTube and Lenovo, gives students the opportunity to submit a science experiment that will be conducted at the International Space Station and streamed live to Earth via YouTube. ...
  10.12.11

• Atom-Thick Graphene Sheets Could Make Great Camera Sensors
  Graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, could end up making a pretty good camera sensor. Researchers at MIT have discovered that graphene can turn light into electricity, but not the way you'd think. Unlike camera sensors and solar panels which rely on the photovoltaic effect, graphene creates a current because of a temperature difference. When light ...
  10.11.11

• Student Competition Challenges High School Students to Innovate
  Innovation can come from a lot of places. Often, it comes from years of research and development from companies or investors with budgets and facilities, from scientists with ideas to be tested or entrepreneurs with new businesses that challenge the status quo. But sometimes it takes an outside view of a problem to spark a ...
  10.11.11

• Science for Citizens at the World Maker Faire
  Science is a dirty business. Well, at least it is for paleontologists who sort through the dirt found around a fossils. Paleontologists call this material found around fossilized remains the fossil matrix, and it gives clues about the environment the creature lived in. While at the World Maker Faire my daughter had a ...
  10.11.11

• Friday Field Photo #157: Evidence of a 500 Million Year Old Storm
  This week's Friday Field Photo is from a quick jaunt I took yesterday to scout out some outcrops for the class I'm teaching this term. If you know me or anything about this blog you know that I don't spend a lot of time discussing carbonate sedimentary rocks. This is not because they aren't interesting, ...
  10.07.11

• Alt Text: Shedding Light on Dark Energy's Mysteries
  If you follow science news, you've heard a lot about something called "dark energy," and you're probably feeling lost and confused. What is it? Is it important? Could it affect Superman, who is normally only vulnerable to Kryptonite or magic? Let me explain.
  10.07.11

• Nobel Awarded to Researcher Who Redefined Crystalline
  The Nobel Prize in chemistry has gone to a lone researcher who illuminated something even more basic than the universe's structure: His discovery of what's now termed a quasicrystal actually redefined what a crystalline solid is.
  10.05.11

• Lost Worlds Survive in Living Fossils
  The ancient world lives on in these plants and animals that have remained nearly unchanged for millions of years.
  10.05.11

• The Plan to Bring an Asteroid to Earth
  Scientists and engineers met last week at Caltech to discuss the possibility of capturing an asteroid and placing it in orbit near Earth to use as a base for manned space missions further into the solar system.
  10.05.11

• Climate Shifts Sparked 17th-Century Conflicts
  A controversial new study suggests that most of humankind's maladies -- from wars to epidemics to economic downturns -- can be traced to climate fluctuations.
  10.04.11

• Watch: 'Invisibility Cloak' Uses Mirages to Make Objects Vanish
  Researchers from the University of Dallas have hijacked one of nature's most intriguing phenomena -- the mirage -- to make an invisibility cloak. It can hide objects from view, works best underwater and even has a near-instant on/off switch.
  10.04.11

• Oct. 4, 1957: Soviets Put Man-Made Moon in Orbit!
  The shock of Sputnik reverberates around the world, heralding not only the dawn of the Space Age but the ratcheting up of an already heated Cold War.
  10.04.11

• Recent Human Evolution Detected in Quebec Town History
  Though ongoing human evolution is difficult to see, researchers believe they've found signs of rapid genetic changes among the recent residents of a small Canadian town.
  10.03.11

• What Rocks: The Week's Best In the Geoblogosphere
  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 this ...
  10.03.11

• Neutrinos and the Speed of Light -- A Primer on the CERN Study (GeekDad Weekly Rewind)
  Recently, a group of physicists have been working to measure the neutrinos generated from a particle accelerator at CERN. This group discovered neutrinos arriving faster than would have been expected and they appear to be traveling faster than the speed of light itself, but they draw no definitive conclusions. This has been widely reported as ...
  10.01.11

• Study Finds Women's Voices Are Unreliable Sign of Fertility
  Though some research suggests that women unconsciously advertise their fertility, a new study shows that their voices are misleading to would-be mates.
  09.30.11

• Friday Field Photo #156: Meandering Tracks of an Ancient Critter
  This week's Friday Field Photo is from Pennsylvanian aged (~300 million years old) strata exposed in southern West Virginia. Actually, it's a slab of fine-grained sandstone used to construct a pathway very close to Pennsylvanian strata. It's certainly possible it's from very far away, but I'm going to guess that it's from nearby stone quarries ...
  09.30.11

• Mercury's Explosive Volcanic History Revealed
  The latest images and science from NASA's Mercury-orbiting spacecraft reveal that the planet has a much more active, exciting history than we thought.
  09.29.11

• No Joking: Feynman Is Brilliant
  I have a confession: I didn't actually know a whole lot about Richard Feynman. Well, okay, I knew a bit about his role at Los Alamos from a history class, and I knew a little about his outsized personality and love for playing pranks, but I hadn't actually read or watched any of his lectures, ...
  09.29.11

• Recovery Club: Pro-Level Training Tools for Weekend Warriors
  Professional athletes have for years had access to better training tools and techniques than us workaday amateurs. Now a new club makes these tools available to anyone for $60 a month.
  09.28.11

• Ex-NASA Man Squeezes Cloud Onto USB Stick
  Piston Cloud Computing has created a device and Linux based operating system that lets you configure an OpenStack cloud in a matter of minutes from a USB stick, in an effort to streamline the creation of such clouds behind the firewall.
  09.28.11

• How to Hatch a Dinosaur
  Scientists know how to turn a chicken into a dinosaur. What could possibly go wrong?
  09.26.11