Messenger Probe Sends Back New Data From Mercury
There’s a small spacecraft called Messenger that’s been orbiting the planet Mercury for a year. Today, at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, astronomers revealed what they’ve learned about the innermost planet in our solar system, and some of the new knowledge is puzzling. Maria Zuber, a planetary scientist at the Massachusetts Institute [...]
When James Cameron Hits Bottom, We Will Hear Him
You are the first, the first person to reach the moon, climb Everest, cross the ocean, reach the Pole, the first person ever. You have just done a dangerous, remarkable deed, and now that you’ve done it, what do you do? You say something. “One small step…” Something to mark the moment. Any hour now, [...]
Brilliant Idea: More Than 80,000 Of Einstein’s Documents Going Online
More than 80,000 of Albert Einstein’s papers, including his most famous formula — E=mc² — and letters to and from his former mistresses, are going online at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As NPR’s Lourdes Garcia-Navarro says on All Things Considered, “what the trove uncovers is a picture of complex man who was concerned about the [...]
Blurring The Line Between Life And Death
Dick Teresi wanted to write about how science determines the point between life and death. After a decade of research, Teresi says he still doesn’t know what death is, but that the breadth of his ignorance has been widely expanded. Teresi’s findings have been published in his new book, The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water [...]
Domesticated Foxes: Man’s New Best Friend?
For thousands of years, dogs have been our companions. After countless generations of selective breeding, they’ve become hard-wired to follow human commands: sit, lie down, jump, even shake. So far, most other animals don’t come close. But what if they could? In 1954 a Russian geneticist named Dmitry Belyaev wanted to isolate the genes that [...]
Weekend Special: Great Teacher, Short Question, Wild Answer
The question was simple enough. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest science teachers of our age, physicist, scholar, Nobel Laureate, bongo player, a man who could explain pretty much anything, is sitting, a little uncomfortably, in an easy chair and the reporter interviewing him asks: Why do magnets work? Feynman shifts a little. “You’re asking…” [...]
Drunk On Biology For St. Patrick’s Day
Have you ever wondered what would happen if Louis Pasteur joined The Clancy Brothers? Or if The Chieftains were more nerdy and less talented? Well, wonder no longer! I wrote this song about the science of beer last year and the folks at The Salt asked me to dust it off in celebration of St. [...]
When Fruit Flies Strike Out, They Like To Booze It Up
Have pity on these poor fruit flies. Researchers made a bunch of male fruit flies into boozehounds by pushing them on females unreceptive to their advances. After a few days of striking out, the male losers, referred to as the “rejected-isolated” group in a study published online by Science, drowned their sorrows in alcohol. They [...]
Just How Big Are The Eyes Of A Giant Squid?
Giant and colossal squids can be more than 40 feet long, if you measure all the way out to the tip of their two long feeding tentacles. But it’s their eyes that are truly huge — the size of basketballs. Now, scientists say these squids may have the biggest eyes in the animal kingdom because [...]
Raging Sunstorms In Our Minds
Get ready for Solar Flare TV — The sun is entering an 11 year flare cycle, (we had an early example last week) and flares have everything a newsroom loves: first, enormous ropes of flame leap off the sun, then torrents of “charged particles” hurtle to Earth at a million miles an hour, then newscasters [...]
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