Science News

The inaugural National Robotics Week , which kicks off Saturday and lasts through April 18 (apparently, a robot's week doesn't start on Sunday like ours does), aims to recognize the role that robots play worldwide in agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, national defense and security , and transportation. [More]

NASA leaders revealed April 8 the framework of their plans to enact President Obama's budget request for 2011 , a contentious proposal that would redirect the agency's current efforts away from a moon landing in the next decade and that would rely on commercial partners to launch astronauts into orbit. In a teleconference with reporters NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and Deputy Administrator Lori Garver described how future funds and projects would be allocated among the agency's many centers across the country, assuming that Obama's budget wins congressional approval. [More]

A new 2,100-square-meter building outside Frankfurt, Germany, houses a series of chambers that can simulate a hot, humid day or temperatures so frigid that metals crack, and every punishing weather scenario in between. It's all for testing one product--solar photovoltaic panels --and it's the third such facility opened since 2008. [More]

Armed bands of poachers are illegally collecting Madagascar's radiated tortoise ( Astrochelys radiata ) by the truckload for the lucrative pet and meat trades, according to a report from the Turtle Survival Alliance (TSA) and Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). As a result of this rampant overexploitation the once-common species could be driven into extinction in the next two decades. Radiated tortoises, considered by many to be one of the most beautiful of all turtles, and therefore highly valued in the pet trade, are only found in Madagascar. [More]

Brown dwarfs straddle the divide between planets and stars--they are celestial objects too small to burn hydrogen in fusion reactions, as stars do, but they are large enough to sustain other kinds of fusion. At least a few even harbor orbiting planets. The International Astronomical Union sets the planet–brown dwarf boundary at 13 times the mass of Jupiter. But that mass limit is an imperfect definition--what of brown dwarf–size bodies that orbit stars, behaving themselves like supersized planets? [More]

A barometer measures atmospheric pressure. Now a coalition of biologists is calling for a similar scientific tool to measure extinction pressure on Earth's biodiversity--a so-called " barometer of life ". [More]

NASA's Apollo moon missions , which lasted from 1968 to 1972, were responsible for putting the first human on an extraterrestrial surface. Six of the missions landed on the moon , where astronauts carried out a number of experiments, studying soil mechanics, micrometeoroids, seismographic activity, heat flow, lunar ranging, magnetic fields and solar wind. [More]

AUSTIN, Texas -- Feb. 28, 2010, was a banner day for Texas wind to set the clouds -- and electrons -- flying.

In the Panhandle, gusts reached 47 miles per hour and wind generators delivered a record 6,242 megawatts of power to Dallas, Austin and other population centers. At 1 p.m., 22 percent of all the electricity consumed in the Texas grid was coming from wind.

As scientists delve deeper beneath the ocean’s surface, they find bizarre creatures that have adapted to harsh and extreme environments. Now comes a new one--the discovery of the first multicellular animals that survive and reproduce entirely without oxygen. [Roberto Danovaro et al, BMC Biology ,  http://bit.ly/dcICgo ]

Researchers had thought that only single-celled organisms such as prokaryotes and protozoa could live in the oxygen-deprived environments of the deepest ocean. When scientists did find multicellular organisms, they assumed that they’d sunk from oxygen-enriched waters.