Everywhere, trees are dying. The boreal forests of Canada and Russia are being devoured by beetles. Drought-tolerant pines are disappearing in Greece. In North Africa, Atlas cedars are shriveling. Wet and dry tropical forests in Asia are collapsing. Australian eucalyptus forests are burning. The Amazon basin has just been hit by two severe droughts. And…
Following up on earlier theoretical predictions, MIT researchers have now demonstrated experimentally the existence of a fundamentally new kind of magnetic behavior, adding to the two previously known states of magnetism. Ferromagnetism – the simple magnetism of a bar magnet or compass needle – has been known for centuries. In a second type of magnetism,…
Well, it’s taken 80 years, but the post–New Deal, post-military-industrial-complex mega-state has finally come up with a single good idea: the construction and deployment of a mobile, moon-sized, planet-killing death ray in outer space. Here is the language of the official petition to build a Death Star–style “space-superiority platform,” submitted to the White House under…
Advocates of manned space flight have long argued that propelling people into orbits has a public appeal unmatched by robotic missions. That was true when astronauts were racing to the moon, but since the Apollo program ended 40 years ago unmanned exploration has provided almost all of our extraterrestrial excitement – at a far lower…
Using 20 tablet computers dropped off in their Ethiopian village in February by a group called One Laptop Per Child, the children of Wenchi now know their ABCs and can spell. The project’s goal was to find out whether children using today’s new technology can teach themselves to read in places where no schools or…
No American should be denied a taxpayer-funded job because of what he or she believes about religion. Yet that’s exactly what is happening today under the “faith-based” initiative. It’s wrong, and it time for it to stop. The idea of awarding tax aid to religious groups to run various secular programs for people in need…
Clemson University student Nathan Weaver set out to determine how to help turtles cross the road. He ended up getting a glimpse into the dark souls of some humans. Weaver put a realistic rubber turtle in the middle of a lane on a busy road near campus. Then he got out of the way and…
An ambitious British plan to search for minute forms of life in an ancient lake beneath Antarctica’s ice has been suspended because of technical problems, the scientist leading the project said. In a move that clears the way for U.S. and Russian teams to take the lead, Professor Martin Siegert said technical problems and a…
The first truly Earth-like alien planet is likely to be spotted next year, an epic discovery that would cause humanity to reassess its place in the universe. While astronomers have found a number of exoplanets over the last few years that share one or two key traits with our own world — such as size…
With each day, the so-called fiscal cliff looms larger as Congress and President Obama work to come to agreement on a federal-deficit compromise, which so far has proven elusive. Absent such an agreement by year’s end, far-reaching spending cuts will be triggered as result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, through a mechanism called…