A report sponsored by NASA has concluded that the agency is failing to inspire the world, the nation or even its own staff, and is unlikely to achieve long-term objectives such as a manned Mars landing. In a report commissioned by Congress last year, the National Research Council also says that NASA’s budget doesn’t match…
A new private venture aims to sell manned trips to the moon by 2020, its founders announced. The company, called Golden Spike (after the final spike built into the First Transcontinental Railroad), plans to sell each moon mission for about $1.5 billion — a relative bargain, said the company’s president and CEO Alan Stern, a…
Mars has long held a fascination for those of us on Earth, but recent NASA pictures of Martian landscapes are giving us a much better understanding of the red planet. Meanwhile, scientists across the globe are working on robots and space suits with the hope that humans may soon explore Mars in person. Check out…
For three weeks spread out over April and October of this year, the Suomi NPP satellite (jointly of NASA and NOAA) scanned all the Earth’s land as it appeared at night. Scientists then mapped the satellite’s data — 2.5 terabytes of it — over an earlier Blue Marble image, transforming that picture’s daytime blues, browns,…
Within the next five years, it may be possible to charge a cellphone without knowing where it is and destroy tumors no matter how deep they are within the body, using research conducted at the University of Maryland. Through an age-old technique called time reversal, a team of professors discovered how to communicate — by…
A two-billion-dollar robot scoops up pale-red samples on the surface of Mars to search for chemical clues in the powdery grains of the alien soil. At the same time, British scientists brave a notoriously windswept plain in Antarctica to investigate an ancient lake lying hidden beneath the ice-sheet. The two missions are exploring different planets…
As food allergies become increasingly common, a new study offers the first proof that they may be linked to pesticides found in tap water. Researchers at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology used existing government data to see whether people with more dichlorophenols in their urine were more likely to have food allergies….
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll makes the search for the Higgs boson a scientific detective story. At heart is the mystery of the universe.
The robotic equivalent of a Swiss army knife
Reconfigurable robot a step toward something that can become almost anything.
A group of neuroscientists and software engineers at the University of Waterloo in Canada are claiming to have built the world’s most complex, large-scale model simulation of the human brain. The simulated brain, which runs on a supercomputer, has a digital eye which it uses for visual input, a robotic arm that it uses to…