With summer officially here and school officially out, the roads will soon be full of people driving to and from the beach, the cottage and/or grandma’s house. Just in time, new research has appeared that sheds new light on how drivers can best keep their minds–and, as a result, their cars–on the road. First, some …
Tag: science
Dust devils
You see them mostly on hot, dry days, weaving along the edges of fallow fields: tall, snaking columns of whirling dust. They’re dust devils, and they’re coming under increasing study: not so much because of their effects on Earth but because they’ve also been seen on Mars, where they may threaten future landers. Even on …
Mount Rushmore
A recent trip to the United States provided me with an opportunity to see Mount Rushmore for the first time in more than 20 years…and marvel once again at what is both a great artistic work and a marvel of technological ingenuity. The seed that grew into Mount Rushmore was planted by Doane Robinson, …
The Mars land rush
If you’re looking for an unpopulated spot to vacation in this winter, Mars isn’t it. In interplanetary terms, the Mars neighborhood is going to be rather crowded, as spacecraft from Europe and the United States descend on it in a kind of Martian land rush. It’s not a coincidence: the orbital mechanics involved have produced …
Rise of the aircar
It’s almost summer, that time of year when millions of vacationers develop whole new vocabularies as they curse the slow-moving RVs behind which they’re stuck. What they need is a car that can fly, a.k.a. an aircar, a staple of science fiction stories since at least the 1930s, but something that hasn’t gotten off the …
Turning anything to oil
Imagine a process that can turn any kind of organic waste into high-grade oil. It sounds too good to be true. But that’s the promise of the thermal depolymerization process (TDP), outlined in the May issue of the respected popular science magazine Discover (from which most of the following information is drawn). Naturally occurring oil …
Cyberfarming
City dwellers tend to think of the high-tech revolution as primarily an urban phenomenon–hip office workers thumb-typing messages to each other on their pagers while standing in line for lattes, for example. But the countryside is well on its way to becoming as high-tech as the city, as new technologies relentlessly transform agriculture into something …
Orchids
Over the weekend, the Regina Orchid Society held its annual show and sale. I know this, even though I was out of town, because when I got home we had orchids in our living room. The Regina Orchid Society, which has about 40 members and has been around for 15 years, and countless societies like …
The colossal squid
I don’t know how you feel about calamari, but it’s always been a little too rubber-band-like to be one of my favorites. However you feel about it, though, I’m pretty sure you can agree with me that it’s far better to eat calamari than to have the calamari eating you. That unsettling prospect was raised …
SETI @ Home, revisited
Every day, I help search for extraterrestrial intelligence…or, at least, my computer does. It’s one of more than 4,287,000 computers worldwide called SETI@Home (SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) which constantly examine data collected by the huge Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico for signals that could have come from extraterrestrial civilizations. Any signals …
Neanderthals revisited
If I were to call you a Neanderthal, you’d think I was calling you brutish, primitive, and stupid. Allow me to set the record straight: Neanderthals were none of the above. Neanderthals were a type of human that lived between 350,000 and 27,000 years ago, mostly in Europe. They get their name from the Neander …
From tennis elbow to hot-tub lung
Once upon a time, most of the injuries people suffered were the result of the hard physical labor they had to perform day-in and day-out to survive. Today we have a whole new set of injuries and ailments that are the result, not of hard work, but of recreation. Take hot-tub long, for instance. This …
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