coondoggie writes to tell us that NASA has started down the road to reinvention with the addition of four new committees to the external advisory group that drives the agency's direction. The four new committees include Commercial Space, Ed...
Multiple missions have been sent to Mars with the hopes of testing the surface of the planet for life or the conditions that could create life. The question of whether life in the form of bacteria (or something even more exotic) exists on Ma...
My girlfriend is training to be a speech and language therapist here in the UK (speech pathologist in the US). A number of clients are guys who enjoy playing computer games, and for a variety of reasons some have no incentive to try and impr...
Yale University researchers believe that if evolutionary pressures of sexual selection and reproductive fitness continue for another 10 generations, the trends detected in their study may mean that the average woman in 2409 AD will be 2 cm s...
A wheat farmer in Australia has eliminated adding fertilizer to his crop by the simple process of injecting the cooled diesel exhaust of his modified tractor into the ground when the wheat is being sown. In doing so he eliminates releasing c...
Science Daily News reports that human missions to Mars and all other long-term space flights might be compromised by disease , first because space travel appears to weaken astronauts' immune systems; and second, because it increases the viru...
Masten Space Systems successfully qualified for first place in level two of the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge Wednesday. Flying a brand new vehicle named XA-0.1E (nicknamed Xoie), Masten demonstrated their ability to build, debug...
An anonymous reader sends along this excerpt from Nature News : Kepler, NASA's mission to search for planets around other stars, will not be able to spot an Earth-sized planet until 2011 , according to the mission's team. The delays are cau...
Great things are expected of terahertz waves , the radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes, paper, wood and brick and so cameras sen...
Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: 'delivering an immortal, invulnerable program.' In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Prin...
Bad drivers may in part have their genes to blame, suggests a new study by UC Irvine neuroscientists. People with a particular gene variant performed more than 20 percent worse on a driving test than people without it and a follow-up test a...
The NY Times reports that after a journey of 7.3 billion light-years, a race between gamma rays ranging from 31 billion electron volts to 10,000 electron volts, a factor of more than a million, in a burst from an exploding star, have arrived...
The skull of a sea-dwelling reptile that could eat a T. Rex for breakfast has been found in Dorset, UK and will be displayed in the local museum. Only the skull (2.4 meters long) has been found, and the authorities (who bought the item for c...
'It's an article of faith: the United States needs more native-born students in science and other technical fields . But a new paper by sociologists at the Urban Institute and Rutgers University contradicts the notion of a shrinking supply o...
The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos has developed a design for a piloted spacecraft powered by a nuclear engine , the head of the agency said on Wednesday. 'The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs,'...