Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
David Weinberger is one of our most incisive thinkers about the digital age, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the author of books such as Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, and the upcoming Too Big to Know. Technology editor Michael…
Dark energy, a mysterious substance thought to be speeding up the expansion of the Universe is really there, according to a team of astronomers at the University of Portsmouth and LMU University Munich. After a two-year study led by Tommaso Giannantonio and Robert Crittenden, the scientists conclude that the likelihood of its existence stands at…
Across the world, many women drop out of — or never enter — work in the ‘knowledge society’, even after studying science and technology. Low enrollment rates for women in all but the life sciences, and high dropout rates after university (almost a third of women in science), result in not only the loss of…
The Internet has become an integral part of people’s lives around the globe, but could the Web exist in space? Researchers at NASA, not content to remain fixed to an Earth-bound system, are pushing the boundaries of network communications by testing what could one day amount to an interplanetary Internet. Working in tandem with the…
Elusive molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere may be helping to cool the planet more efficiently than scientists previously thought, a new study suggests. They are called Criegee intermediates, or Criegee biradicals (named after the German chemist Rudolf Criegee), and are short-lived molecules that form in the Earth’s atmosphere when ozone reacts with alkenes (a family…
Ships’ propellers emit sound in the same frequency range that some whales use for communicating, and previous studies have shown the whales change their calling patterns in noisy places. Now, researchers have measured stress hormones in the faeces of the endangered North Atlantic right whale, and found they rose with the density of shipping. Ocean…