A two-billion-dollar robot scoops up pale-red samples on the surface of Mars to search for chemical clues in the powdery grains of the alien soil. At the same time, British scientists brave a notoriously windswept plain in Antarctica to investigate an ancient lake lying hidden beneath the ice-sheet. The two missions are exploring different planets…
NASA’s long-running Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the edge of the solar system and is close to exiting it forever. Scientists have dubbed this region the “magnetic highway” and it’s the last stop before interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 launched 35 years…
New Math is an attempt to quantify the world using words and basic math.
Universities that want the brightest future for their students ought to stop investing in fossil fuel companies, according to a nationwide climate-change action campaign that was to stop in Utah Monday. “We will have a huge impact if the university gets involved,” said Shannon Kennelly, an environment and sustainability student at the University of Utah…
NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has detected several simple carbon-based organic compounds on Mars, but it remains unclear whether they were formed via Earthly contamination or whether they contain only elements indigenous to the planet. Speaking at the American Geophysical Union annual meeting in San Francisco, Curiosity mission leaders also said that the compound perchlorate—identified previously…
Rich countries spend five times more on fossil-fuel subsidies than on aid to help developing nations cut their emissions and protect against the effects of climate change, the Oil Change International campaign group said. In 2011, 22 industrialized nations paid $58.7 billion in subsidies to the oil, coal and gas industries and to consumers of…
Murder is contagious and may spread like the flu, new research suggests. The researchers relied on the same techniques public-health officials use to track the spread of diseases, but applied them to the spread of homicide in Newark, N.J., over a 26-year span from 1982 to 2008. And just as in other epidemics, certain neighborhoods…
A SciDev.Net survey reveals the challenges of applying research insights to policy and practice, and underscores that evidence is not enough.
Scientists have discovered for the first time how humans — and other mammals — have evolved to have intelligence. Researchers have identified the moment in history when the genes that enabled us to think and reason evolved. This point, 500 million years ago, provided our ability to learn complex skills, analyze situations and have flexibility…
An international team of researchers studying the characteristics of the protoplanetary disk of the star UX Tauri A, have determined that its dust particles are large in size and non-spherical in shape. This exciting result shows that these dust grains are colliding with and adhering to each other, a process that will lead to their…