A SciDev.Net survey reveals the challenges of applying research insights to policy and practice, and underscores that evidence is not enough.
Last summer the last Space Shuttle took its last space flight, but last week it took its last worldly one. It ended a generation’s era of space marvel, which turned out to take a very different path from that of the previous generation. During the 1950s and 1960s, space exploration was primarily a proxy for…
Swedish explorers have put to rest speculation of a spaceship at the bottom of the Baltic — but they’re adding fuel to the ‘what is it’ mystery of this deep-sea object anyway. Digital pictures FoxNews.com has obtained from the team show that the object, located beneath the waves of the Baltic between Sweden and Finland,…
As militaries develop autonomous robotic warriors to replace humans on the battlefield, new ethical questions emerge. If a robot in combat has a hardware malfunction or programming glitch that causes it to kill civilians, do we blame the robot, or the humans who created and deployed it? Some argue that robots do not have free…
At first glance, CS 22892-052 looks like a run-of-the-mill old star. Born about 13 billion years ago, only 700 million years after the big bang, it is lacking in many of the shinier, more interesting elements. But look closer, and you’ll see that this stellar granny is adorned with gold. Now Terese Hansen of the…
As darkness falls on Christmas night, check out the east-southeast sky. Shining brilliantly to the upper left of the bright, nearly full moon will be a silvery “star” with a steady glow. But that’s not a star, or Santa returning to the North Pole. Rather, it’s the largest planet in our solar system, Jupiter, serving…
Big defense budgets during the aughts financed the deployment of thousands of robots, including unmanned aerial and underwater vehicles, to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon’s fascination with robots hasn’t slackened even in these more austere times. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is funding Boston Dynamics’ development of a prototype robot called the Cheetah….