Last September, a few hundred scientists, engineers and space enthusiasts gathered at the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Houston for the second public meeting of 100 Year Starship. The group is run by former astronaut Mae Jemison and funded by DARPA. Its mission is to “make the capability of human travel beyond our solar system to…
Easter, you may have noticed, is not a fixed day in the calendar. The reason has to do with the mismatch between the periodicity of the sun and the moon and the long history of human efforts to create a reliable and consistent calendar.
Most villages along the Baram River in Malaysia cannot count on round-the-clock electricity. Diesel generators hum at night near longhouses in the northwestern corner of the island of Borneo. Mobile and Internet coverage are almost nonexistent. A plan to dam the Baram River would generate power far in excess of current demand in the rainforest…
Just before any predictable disaster hits, it’s almost impossible to take even a medium term view. With the sequester bearing down on us in a couple of days, identifying the immediate consequences is terrifying enough. Just check out the Obama administration’s state-by-state list of the grim weeks ahead. The picture derived from that tally is…
The so-called shale revolution is re-drawing the energy landscape in the United States and beyond. While the Obama administration is still trying to craft a strategy to manage this energy windfall, more than twenty liquefied natural gas (LNG) export applications are awaiting approval to ship U.S. gas abroad. If all were to be given the…
When it comes to data crunching, quantum computers will leave today’s fastest processors in the dust. For starters, a quantum computer would be able to store more bits of information in its memory than there are particles in the universe. And where a conventional silicon-based computer handles one computation at a time in sequence, a…
Information technology that helps doctors and patients make decisions has been around for a long time. Crude online tools like WebMD get millions of visitors a day. But Watson is a different beast. According to IBM, it can digest information and make recommendations much more quickly, and more intelligently, than perhaps any machine before it—processing…
Are people exposed to doses of bisphenol A in their canned foods and other consumer products that can harm them? Or are the amounts too low to cause any harm? This is the crux of a vehement debate that is being waged as federal officials are trying to decide whether the chemical, known as BPA,…
“Why hyperdecant?” Myhrvold asked the audience in a plenary lecture here on Saturday at the annual meeting of AAAS (which publishes ScienceNOW). “To improve the flavor of a young red wine, it’s faster than letting wine breathe unaided,” because the mechanical agitating provides more surface area to aerate the wine more rapidly. “But the real…
Software can transform a computer from a word processor to a number cruncher to a video telephone. But the underlying hardware is unchanged. Now, a type of transistor that can be switched with magnetism instead of electricity could make circuitry malleable too, leading to more efficient and reliable gadgets, from smart phones to satellites.