If the U.S. wants to keep its prominence as a world power and technological innovator in the 21st century, we need to work fast.
Should we build a supercomputer on the moon? It would be a mammoth technical undertaking, but a University of Southern California graduate student thinks there’s a very good reason for doing this: It would help alleviate a coming deep-space network traffic jam that’s had NASA scientists worried for several years now. Ouliang Chang floated his…
Private companies building new spaceships to soar through orbital and suborbital space are looking forward to an action-packed year in 2013, with new flight tests, launches, wind tunnel tests and rocket technology trials all planned during the new year. Of the many spacecraft being developed only one has already flown in space, the Dragon capsule…
The Earth’s oceans may be acidifying faster than at any point during the last 300 million years due to industrial emissions, endangering marine life from oysters and reefs to sea-going salmon, researchers said. Scientists found surging levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forced down the pH of the ocean by 0.1 unit in the…
Today I’d like to go back to a topic that leaves most people perplexed, me included: the nature of consciousness and how it “emerges” in our brains. I wrote about this a few months ago, promising to get back to it. At this point, no scientist or philosopher in the world knows how to answer…
Two new horned dinosaurs have been named based on fossils collected from Alberta, Canada. Unescopceratops koppelhusae and Gryphoceratops morrisoni are new species from the Leptoceratopsidae horned dinosaur family. The herbivores lived during the Late Cretaceous, between 75 to 83 million years ago. The specimens are described in Cretaceous Research. “These dinosaurs fill important gaps in…
This is a phrase a lot of science communicators like to use because giving people a sense of scale when it comes to large numbers is so difficult. That’s why journalists report distances as number of football fields, mass as number of fully-loaded 747s, energy in terms of Hiroshima bombs, etc. Even though we can’t…