Science News

When a mystery object smacked into Jupiter without warning in July 2009 , an event whose aftermath was first spotted by an amateur astronomer in Australia, observers across the globe scrambled to get a look at the planet to figure out just what had happened. [More]

By Kristen Hays

Imagine having a pet in your family for 79 years and through four generations. Now imagine that during that time your pet became an endangered species. Finally, imagine having that pet stolen from your backyard. [More]

July is coming. It’s a time to fire up the barbecue, hit the beaches and watch the fireworks. It’s definitely not a time to be in the hospital. Because fatal medical errors peak in July, an increase that happens to coincide with the annual arrival of new medical residents. That’s according to a study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine . [David Phillips and Gwendolyn Barker, http://bit.ly/aHihSS ]

Could new docs really be deadly? That’s what sociologists at the University of California, San Diego, were wondering. They examined almost a quarter of a million death certificates issued in the U.S. between 1979 and 2006. And they focused on those that showed a mistake with medication as the primary cause of death. They then recorded the month in which the error was made, and whether the incident occurred in a county with teaching hospitals. Turned out that fatal medication errors spiked only in July, which is when new residents hit the wards. And this peak was seen only in regions where training takes place.

The mysterious phenomenon known as quantum entanglement --where objects seemingly communicate at speeds faster than light to instantaneously influence one another, regardless of their distance apart--was famously dismissed by Einstein as "spooky action at a distance." New experiments could soon answer skeptics by enabling people to see entangled pulses of light with the naked eye. [More]

For NASA's Spirit rover, the days of roaming the Red Planet may now be in the past, but the observations the wheeled bot made in its travels are still paying scientific dividends. A new analysis of geologic data gathered by the rover nearly five years ago finds that a rock outcrop on Mars is rich in carbonates, which are minerals that form readily in watery, carbon-rich environments. According to the study, the finding lends more credence to the hypothesis that Mars may have once had a wetter, warmer climate thanks to a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere. What is more, the aqueous processes implicated in the carbonate formation point to a neutral environment more hospitable to life than the acidic waters thought to have existed elsewhere on Mars . [More]

Back in 1995, I had the pleasure of visiting the IBM Almaden lab of Donald Eigler, who was announced today as a winner of this year's Kavli Prize for his work on nanoscience. Eigler made his mark nearly two decades ago when he showed how he could move individual atoms around with a scanning tunneling microscope, first to spell out the letters of his employer and later to draw images such as this stick figure made from carbon monoxide molecules. Such atomic-scale control not only can elucidate fundamental physics, but it could also be the basis for new computing and sensing technologies.   [More]