Category: Blog

NASA has successfully flown its X-43A hypersonic plane over California. The scramjet-powered test craft briefly reached a record Mach 7. Yay!

It sounds like a lost Bob Dylan album, but the “dark-matter highway” on eresearcher claims may be showering down on Earth could be our best hope of unravelling the secret of the Universe’s missing mass.

Here’s a fascinating article about hypergraphia, a compulsion to write, using more words than needed, to fill the aching void of the page, or the computer screen, to pour out one’s soul into the soundless vaccum that is the aching… Um. Well. You get the idea.

Sony plans to release an e-book readerbased on electronic ink in April. No mention in the story of all the independent e-book publishers out there, like Awe-Struck, publisher of my award-winning YA fantasy Spirit Singer, but never mind that: this is the kind of technology that may yet make e-books as ubiquitious as they deserve …

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A new study suggests humans owe their big brains to a mutation that weakened their jaw muscles. Ironic, since big brains led to speech, which has led to people exercising their jaws over everything under the sun ever since.

Here’s an interesting article about attempts to develop prosthetic devices for humans activated by thought alone. Good idea. But who was the editor that allowed the headline to read “Thought-control system tested on humans”? Guys, a “thought-control system” would be a system that controls people’s thoughts, not a system controlled by people’s thoughts. Although it …

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It sounds like science fiction: strap a few electrodes onto someone’s head and determine whether his or her brain contains certain information. But in fact “brain fingerprinting” is here today. Brain fingerprinting is based on the “ah-ha” response, an involuntary response by the brain to information it has been exposed to before. Dr. Lawrence Farwell, …

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A bright fireball lit the sky over Saskatchewan…and I missed it.

Nope, “The Ancient Sea of Mars” is not the title of a lost Barsoomian tale by Edgar Rice Burroughs; it’s where one of the Mars Rovers touched down! Next thing you know they’ll spot a fossil…

First Norway was attacked by Stalinist crabs, then Europe was overrun by Nazi raccoons, and now Chile is under attack by giant squids. Apparently those ’50s sci-fi movie makers were better at predicting the future than we thought.

NASA is set to make another announcement of a “major scientific finding” from the Opportunity rover, tomorrow at 2 p.m. EST.