Category: Blog

NASA has set May 15 as the launch date for the first space shuttle mission since the Columbia disaster of two years ago.

Does part of our brain act as an early warning system, monitoring environmental cues for possible danger? And is that why primitive tribes escaped devastation from the December 26 tsunami?

A team of experts will announce in March whether their test results on Tutankhamun ‘s mummy supports the idea that the boy king was murdered. Maybe the butler did it!

The December 26 tsunami appears to have uncovered the remains of a seventh-century port city in India.

I take a particular interest in Scotty the T-Rex‘s travels, because I had the opportunity to visit the site near Eastend where he was dug out of the ground, while he was still mostly in it (I was doing some work on a documentary about it). He was discovered by a school-teacher who happened to …

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There’s an interesting round-up of recent stories in the field of alternative energy posted at Winds of Change. I’ve always felt that conservation, while laudable and important, is not an end in itself: it’s a way to buy time until better sources of energy are available–’cause the future I want to live in (and want …

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Samuel W. Alderson, physicist, engineer, and pioneer in developing the crash-test dummy, has died–and, as proof that the universe does not always organize itself along ironic lines, he died of natural causes.

…but “baby” isn’t a toddler, it’s a robot that learns to walk the same way humans do…and keeps learning.

…has advanced in monkey trials. A monkey at the University of Pittsburgh, outfitted with a child-sized robotic arm controlled directly by its own brain signals, can feed itself chunks of fruits and vegetables. Sounds very promising…

It’s still too early to say for certain, but at least one scientist thinks there’s a strong possibility that the apparent methane in Mars’s atmosphere must be coming from life in the soil. The debate continues.

Contact lenses you wear overnight to temporarily correct nearsightedness the next day? The technology is here–but I doubt it will do the trick on my abysmal optical orbs. Good news for the more run-of-the-mill contact wearer, though.

I don’t care.