From Colin Sage’s Environment and Food to Michael Carolan’s The Real Cost of Cheap Food, here are a handful of new food books from the fall season that are worth checking out.
A Southern California-based space company has successfully tested a reusable rocket it hopes will make it cheaper to go into space. The Torrance Daily Breeze says Hawthorne-based SpaceX released a video showing the test of its Grasshopper rocket. During a 29-second flight on Dec. 17, Grasshopper blasted 131 feet into the air from a pad in…
When it comes to climbing waterfalls, the Nopili rock-climbing goby really puts its teeth into it. The inch-long fish uses suckers in its mouth and belly to move up steep cliffs in its rugged Hawaiian habitat. Because its freshwater habitat is easily disturbed—by a big storm, for instance—the fish often crawl up waterfalls to return…
How can we think 100 years ahead, and is that enough? Well, it’s not enough, but it’s a fantastic start. I think that to trust the future of the Earth to economists, after what we’ve seen over the last few years is total insanity. And economists who teach us to discount the future don’t see…
For much of the 20th century, the question of building mind from matter was considered so difficult that consciousness was a topic non grata. The Behaviorist school of thought held that consciousness was an illusion: The brain was to be understood simply as an input-output black box of reflexes, and that’s where the investigation must…
The false mouse memories made the ethicists uneasy. By stimulating certain neurons in the hippocampus, Susumu Tonegawa and his colleagues caused mice to recall receiving foot shocks in a setting in which none had occurred1. Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says that he has no plans to ever implant…
Getting a six-wheeled car-size rover safely onto the surface of the red planet? Daunting, sure. But NASA did it with Curiosity. Sending humans on a mission to Mars? That requires overcoming even more outlandish obstacles. Here’s a look at five of the top challenges to safely getting astronauts to Mars, as well as potential solutions….