Science News

Even if a grown man could pull 95,000 kilograms, he still would get shown up by the newly crowned world's strongest insect--proportionally speaking. [More]

Back in May 2009, the Hubble Space Telescope got its final tune-up . The seven astronauts of the STS-125 mission flew to Hubble on space shuttle Atlantis, grabbed the observatory with a robotic arm and pulled Hubble into the shuttle's open payload bay for repair. They then commenced an intensive servicing itinerary that spanned five spacewalks. Although the mission was not without its hiccups--some of the instruments were never meant to be repaired in space and proved difficult to work on-- the Atlantis crew left Hubble revitalized , with one camera repaired, another replaced altogether, a new spectrograph installed and a slew of old or failing parts swapped out. [More]

Dan Nocera is a salesman who doesn't need the sale. For his entire career, he's pursued a simple question: Just how do plants take sunlight, combine it with water and get energy out of it?

After 25 years of study, he's begun to mimic the process in a small, cheap gadget. It runs on just a bottle of water a day.

Advances in science and technology can launch from unassuming springboards. In 1609 Galileo tweaked a toylike spyglass , pointed it at the moon and Jupiter (not the neighbors), and astronomy took a quantum leap. About 150 years later, Benjamin Franklin reportedly used a kite to experiment with one of the earliest-known electrical capacitors. Continuing that tradition, these researchers prove toys inspire more than child's play. [More]

Of all scientific fields, neuroscience has the greatest potential for revolutionary advances, philosophical and practical. Someday, brain researchers may figure out how precisely the brain encodes thoughts like the ones I’m thinking now. Cracking the neural code could help solve the mind-body problem, ending millennia of pointless metaphysical chitchat. We may finally understand how brains work and why sometimes they don’t. We might even discover truly effective treatments for depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and dementia and chuck our current quasi-therapies.   [More]

Here are two seemingly unrelated facts. One: from the late 1940s through 1963, we tested atomic bombs in the atmosphere. Two: wine lovers are sometimes duped into spending exorbitant amounts for fake vintage bottles that weren’t from the year they were supposedly grown.

But Graham Jones at Australia’s University of Adelaide thought he could use bomb information against counterfeit wines. [He talked about his research at the meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Francisco.] Carbon dating works by comparing the amount of carbon 14, which is a less common and less stable form of carbon, to the more abundant carbon 12.

In his wonderful new book The Checklist Manifesto (Metropolitan Books, 2009), surgeon and author Atul Gawande explains how successful surgery depends on the complex interactions of surgeons, nurses, anesthetists and other specialists, who must possess not only highly specialized skills but also the ability to work as a team in the face of rapidly arising challenges. The same applies to an airliner’s pilot, co-pilot and crew. Special tools such as checklists, decision trees and artificial intelligence built into instrumentation are key.

Information technology empowers complex group processes in striking new ways, but the breakthroughs are especially exciting in very low income settings. There mobile telephony and wireless broadband are ending the grinding isolation of rural communities and enabling workers--even those with fairly rudimentary training--to interconnect more successfully and to tap into expert systems and artificial intelligence.

As drivers await the arrival of General Motors's much-anticipated Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car later this year, GM unveiled an electric vehicle of an entirely different stripe on Wednesday at the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai . The company's Electric Networked Vehicle (EN-V) is a mini electric vehicle built for two, unless you are using it to go shopping, in which case you might have room for yourself and a bag of groceries. [More]