I’ve finally heard when my short story “Strange Harvest” will be on CBC Radio’s Between the Covers. It will be part of “Six Impossible Things,” a special series of short speculative fiction that will air weekdays from May 16 through May 27, hosted and curated by Nalo Hopkinson, who will also have a piece in …
How did dinosaurs lay their eggs? We now have a much better idea, thanks to a stunning fossil discovery.
Here’s a new alarm clock that wakes you when you’re ready–that is, when you’re in the lightest stage of sleep. You program it with the latest time you want to be wakened, and it wakes you in the last lightest sleep phase before that. (It monitors your brain waves with a special headband.) I think …
Alas, the “alien species” in question is an invasive type of water snail, not blue-skinned intelligent slugs from Oom’la’khor IV seeking to help out primitive planets like ours in their development…but I’m still calling it the “Science Fiction Headline of the Day.” You can do that when you’re the sole judge of the contest.
…literally, if the walls are part of an installation using neural software that can pick out suspicious sounds–gun shots, say, or breaking glass–from a noisy environment.
Maybe listening for radio signals is the wrong way to find extra-terrestrials; a better method might be to look for giant artificial structures–and new telescopes will give us the ability to do it.
Since all of my science columns are online, I frequently get questions out of the blue about past column topics. This week, for example, I received an e-mail from a mother whose nine-year-old had decided to do a third-grade science project on glue. They’d found my column on the topic from a decade ago, and …
A new U.S. Air Force satellite has been launched to do something no one has ever tried before: seek out and inspect other satellites in orbit. It may visit as many as eight satellites during its mission, maneuvering around them and taking pictures. This could lead to a new breed of service satellites that can …
According to Aubrey de Grey, if you can hang on for another 25 years, you have a decent chance of living to be 1,000–or more. I’m not holding my breath. (Well, obviously, because if I hold my breath, I definitely won’t make it another 25 years, will I?)
“Science’s Doomsday Team vs. the Asteroids” is a fascinating–and slightly frightening–tale about the discovery of the asteroid that’s going to miss us–but only by a little bit–in 2029, but may still have an explosive rendezvous with the planet sometime after that.
A bionic suit has been developed that could help older or disabled people walk or lift heavy objects. It’s called HAL, for hybrid assistive limb. They’re up to HAL 3, so far. Gee, I wonder what the HAL 9000 will look like? (If you get that reference, I’m afraid you’re a fellow geek. Or possibly …
Long-forgotten recordings by jazz superstars Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Ray Charles and the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, never before heard in the U.S., have been unearthed in the Library or Congress. Cool.
