Methane may be an invisible gas, but that doesn’t mean you can ignore it. Here on Earth, it’s both a valuable resource (it’s the major constituent of natural gas) and a contributor to global warming (molecule for molecule, methane traps more than 20 times more heat than carbon dioxide). Now it appears it may also …
And don’t I wish this was me!
This cool new phenomenon, in which light is converted to sound waves, wins my weekly award for “news story I can most easily relate to science fiction”–or would, if I offered such an award. Money quote: “Through further studies, Bozovic hopes to learn more about this phenomenon, the first step toward finding possible applications for …
According to an Austrian doctor, picking your nose and eating it is a terrific way to stay healthy and happy.
When it comes to dead zones, Stephen King’s novel isn’t nearly as scary as the real thing.
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 …
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 …
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, …
