Geoengineering has been a hot topic of late and now comes a new study looking at the possibility of using solar geoengineering to counter the loss of Arctic sea ice by tailoring geoengineering by region and by need. A team of leading researchers developed a new computer model that promises to maximise the effectiveness of…
In a key step toward creating a working quantum computer, Princeton researchers have developed a method that may allow the quick and reliable transfer of quantum information throughout a computing device The finding, by a team led by Princeton physicist Jason Petta, could eventually allow engineers to build quantum computers consisting of millions of quantum…
A special issue of Nature examines the changing global landscape of research.
Using its country-specific content-blocking tool for the first time, Twitter has shut down access to a neo-Nazi group’s account in Germany. “Never want to withhold content; good to have tools to do it narrowly & transparently,” Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel, tweeted. “We announced the ability to withhold content back in Jan. We’re using it…
The 2012 presidential election will be won by the candidate who can convince voters that he has the vision to lift the nation out of the economic doldrums. The economy is the right topic, but the discussion neglects the true driver of the country’s prosperity: scientific and technological enterprise. Half of the U.S. economic growth…
Every historian knows about the Rosetta Stone, which had an ancient Egyptian text carved on it in three different scripts, two of which had long resisted translation. The ability to cross-correlate the scripts—to calibrate their alphabets—opened up a huge body of knowledge to scholars. Climate researchers, as well as archaeologists and geologists, look for similar…
Scientists like to think that true measures of our understanding are our ability to predict something, and, in experimental physics, control something. This year’s Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Serge Haroche and David Wineland for controlling the quantum world in ways that, not so long ago, were simply unthinkable. In this case,…
Social media was a major force behind last year’s Arab Spring, after communities organized and overthrew tyrannical dictators, as well as last month’s riots across the Muslim world, after the trailer for The Innocence of Muslims circulated on the Internet. Like most technologies, social media can promote the good or accentuate the bad. But does…
It’s been 3 years since the legality of federal funding for research involving human embryonic stem cells (hESC) was first brought to the US court system, and despite some tense moments, including a temporary ban on National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for hESC research, the courts have continued to uphold the legality of such…
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…