The 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating human expansion into other star systems, has some crucial hurdles to overcome. Basically, interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission, which isn’t possible yet. But a University of Missouri researcher thinks he has found the solution to a…
He’s been called “America’s fiercest climate blogger.” And as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a former Clinton administration official on clean energy, and an MIT trained physicist, the subjects he covers are vast—ranging from energy policy to the role of rhetoric in communications. But there’s been a recurrent theme over the…
University of Adelaide applied mathematicians have extended Einstein’s theory of special relativity to work beyond the speed of light. Einstein’s theory holds that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, but Professor Jim Hill and Dr Barry Cox in the University’s School of Mathematical Sciences have developed new formulas that allow for travel…
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapor to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star. Stars form within cold, dark clouds of gas and dust – ‘pre-stellar cores’ – that contain all the ingredients…
Two U.S. scientists shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for learning how cells respond to the world around them, a finding that underpins many prescription drugs on the market today, from beta blockers and antihistamines to various kinds of psychiatric medications. Brian Kobilka, 57, of Stanford University Medical School, and 69-year-old Robert Lefkowitz, of the…
Typically, when we talk about pollution, including carbon emissions, the numbers are talking about entire areas rather than specific locations. Researchers in the US have developed a new software system that is able to accurately map carbon emissions at the street level. The new system allows you to see each individual building, and the carbon…
From Michaela Pommells at Huffington Post: Let’s face it, race inequity may not be a deliberate goal of education policy and practice (or maybe it is) but neither is it accidental. The result is a whole lot of seemingly well-meaning people trying to evoke change in an education system that never intended to educate people…
If we’re going to get science policy right, it’s really important for us to study the economic benefit of open access and not accept the arguments of incumbents. Existing media companies claim that they need ever stronger and longer copyright protection and new, draconian laws to protect them, and meanwhile, new free ecosystems, like the…
Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the U.S. shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising clever laboratory experiments that made it possible to control ghostly quantum particles, an achievement that many theoretical physicists believed could never be done. The work has already led to the creation of clocks more than 100…
This year’s record melt in northern latitudes has surprised – even shocked – many climate scientists. While most of the public attention has focused on the sixth record melt in a row of Arctic summer sea ice, an even bigger story has gone largely unreported. That’s been the record melt of the massive Greenland ice-sheet…