I fly out to Austin for SXSW tomorrow, a day early, but then the craziness starts in earnest soon after. Heading down? Hit me up on Twitter and maybe we’ll meet up. I wasn’t super excited about a lot of the proposed panels at first, but with a little digging I’ve found a significant number [...]
How about picking up the latest issue (Mar-Apr 2011) of Mental_Floss? You’ll find my piece on nuclear waste disposal, with all the crackpot theories that were once proposed, is on pages 30 and 31.
These days, plenty of robots have landed on other planets and been put to work. Still, building a machine that can operate in microgravity around humans but without human control was a unique challenge. The mature, responsible R2 owes its shot at glory in space to a host of robotic “ancestors,” earlier androids that never left Earth as well as less human-like machines that are already hard at work on the ISS.
Because wind power is generated only when the wind blows, and solar energy isn’t collected on a cloudy day, technologies that can store extra power when it’s not being used and mete it out when needed are becoming increasingly important.
Since June 2010 six men—three Russians, two Europeans, and one Chinese—have been living in isolation in a 19,423-cubic-foot (550-cubic-meter) “spaceship” outside Moscow, doing maintenance work, conducting experiments, and trying to stave off boredom by playing Rock Band and reading the complete works of Gabriel García Márquez.
Harry Potter and Bilbo Baggins, take note: Scientists are a step closer to conquering the “magic” of invisibility.
Many earlier cloaking systems turned objects “invisible” only under wavelengths of light that the human eye can’t see. Others could conceal only microscopic objects. But the new system, developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre, works in visible light and can hide objects big enough to see with the naked eye.
Within the past 20 years abundances of the bee species Bombus occidentalis, B. affinis, B. pensylvanicus, and B. terricola have plummeted by up to 96 percent.
The finding is based on a new analysis of more than 73,000 museum collections of bumblebees, which showed where bees had been found over the last century, as well as collections of wild bees across the United States. The study looked at 8 of the 50 known bumblebee species in North America.
The only scientifically observed specimen had been killed by local hunters the time researchers found it—and was eaten soon after. But local demand for monkey meat is only one reason the new species is already considered endangered.
This blog is turning into a place to vent. Today I want to vent about poaching sources. A few times I’ve been contacted by people saying very nice, flattering things about something I’d written lately, followed by “can you tell me who you talked to to write the story because I’m doing one on the [...]
A guinea-pig-like mammal’s prehistoric urine may be one of the best tools for understanding climate change in arid regions, scientists announced Tuesday. Already, analysis of crystallized rock hyrax pee appears to contradict some results of current climate models.