While rovers are ideal for exploring Mars, a boat is best for Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Scientists are proposing a new mission to explore this alluring world that would send a floating probe to land in a lake on Titan, the largest of the more than 60 natural satellites of Saturn. Smaller than Earth but…
Honey bee brains could soon be helping robots act more independently. The way that bees smell and see is being studied in a £1m project to produce a simulation of the insect’s sensory systems. The simulated bee brain will then be used by a flying robot to help it make decisions about how to navigate…
A peek at swirling matter around a giant black hole verifies that it is the source of a monstrous blast of energy thousands of light-years long, researchers say. Bursts of energy known as relativistic jets spew out matter at close to the speed of light. These jets can travel across an entire galaxy, suggesting they…
Washington State University researchers have found that the great-grandchildren of pregnant rats exposed to low doses of dioxin develop diseases and reproductive abnormalities — even though they did not have direct exposure. The finding challenges the traditional explanation of how traits are passed from one generation to another.
As the clock winds down to December 21, experts on the Mayan calendar have been racing to convince people that the Mayas didn’t predict an apocalypse for the end of this year. Some experts are now saying the Mayas may indeed have made prophecies, just not about the end of the world. Archaeologists, anthropologists and…
In certain toy racecar tracks, sneaky players can flip a switch, trapping their opponents’ vehicles in a loop of track. Cells employ a less subtle approach: they change the track’s layout. In a study published online in Science, scientists at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and Oxford University discovered that, by forming or undoing…
We could wring our hands about our unreconstructed nature but sex is at the center of human thought, and always has been. Some of the earliest cave art has erotic themes. We didn’t get where we are without genetic programming that makes us value eating, drinking and having sex. Add to that our inbuilt compulsion…
Astronomers have found a way to measure the size of a black hole. Supermassive black holes reside at the center of galaxies and have gravitational forces so strong that nothing, including light, can escape from being pulled into them. By combining the power of radio dishes in three different states into a super-telescope 2,000 times…
The Higgs boson, the pope, and the curious interaction between organized religion and big science.
Neuroscientists have found brain cells that compute value. Why are economists ignoring them?