Scientific _American

FLU SECURITY [More]

[/url]

Here’s a hot topic: astronomers have detected infrared radiation from a faraway planet not much bigger than our own.
[More]

[/url]

The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA–E) works on a three-year cycle: Funded projects have three years to prove worthy--or not. Program directors who help fund projects such as Plants Engineered to Replace Petroleum ( PETRO ) or Batteries for Electrical Energy Storage in Transportation ( BEEST ) have three years to steer the research. And, after three years at the helm as the founding director of ARPA–E, mechanical engineer Arun Majumdar has announced that he will be stepping down in June.
[More]

[/url]

An excavation of an archaeological site in Guatemala has uncovered Mayan astronomical records dating to the ninth century A.D. The tabulated numbers, which predate existing Mayan astronomical documents by several hundred years, chart the motion of the moon and also seem to relate to the orbits of Mars and Venus. (And good news: they do not predict the world will end this year --in fact, some of the numbers appear to refer to dates far in the future.)
[More]

[/url]

By Jeff Tollefson of Nature magazine
[More]

[/url]

The CIA, working with counterparts in the Middle East, earlier this week halted the latest al Qaeda terrorist plot to bomb aircraft bound for the U.S. The planned attack, which would have come from explosives worn under a passenger's clothing, is reminiscent of the so-called underwear bomb worn by an al Qaeda operative in the failed attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a Detroit-bound passenger airliner on Christmas Day 2009 . The latest underwear bomb found through the covert CIA operation is thought to be the work of Ibrahim Hassan al Asiri , who designed the original device. [More]

[/url]

The stone slabs of England's Stonehenge may have been more than just a spectacular sight to the ancient people who built the structure; they likely created an acoustic environment unlike anything they normally experienced, new research hints.
[More]

[/url]

Once in a while, a supermassive black hole gets a sumptuous treat . A passing star wanders too close and gets caught in the black hole's gravitational pull, like a fly trapped in a spider's web. The star then becomes an easy meal for the black hole, which tears its prey to bits and ingests a good portion of it. 
[More]

[/url]

MAY 1962
[More]

[/url]

A never-before-seen subatomic particle has popped into existence inside the world's largest atom smasher, bringing physicists a step closer to unraveling the mystery of how matter is put together in the universe.
[More]

[/url]

To most people, Wi-Fi is something of a miracle. Within 150 feet of some hidden base station, your laptop, tablet or phone can get online at cable-modem speeds--wirelessly.
[More]

[/url]

Mercury is a world of extremes. Daytime temperature on the planet closest to the sun can soar as high as 400 degrees Celsius near the equator--hot enough to melt lead. When day turns to night, the planet’s surface temperature plunges to below –150 degrees C.
[More]

[/url]

Earlier this year Iran's defense minister put the world on notice: His nation had developed the ability to "easily" watch spacewalking astronauts from the ground. The announcement was largely ignored, in part because it made the minister sound like a James Bond villain. The boast was also a bit anticlimactic, given that even amateur astronomers are already recording in detail what happens in low Earth orbit. Both the technology involved and the techniques used to observe satellites and even the occasional astronaut perched outside the International Space Station (ISS) are improving, much to the presumed chagrin of governments looking to keep certain on orbital activity confidential. [More]

[/url]

New Maps of Mercury Show Icy Looking Craters on the Solar System's Innermost Planet [More]

[/url]

Recently, as a result of my most recent book, A Universe from Nothing , I participated in a wide-ranging and in-depth interview for The Atlantic on questions ranging from the nature of nothing to the best way to encourage people to learn about the fascinating new results in cosmology.  The interview was based on the transcript of a recorded conversation and was hard hitting (and, from my point of view, the interviewer was impressive in his depth), but my friend Dan Dennett recently wrote to me to say that it has been interpreted (probably because it included some verbal off-the-cuff remarks, rather than carefully crafted written responses) by a number of his colleagues and readers as implying a blanket condemnation of philosophy as a discipline, something I had not intended.  
[More]

[/url]

Why is there something rather than nothing? This is one of those profound questions that is easy to ask but difficult to answer. For millennia humans simply said, “God did it”: a creator existed before the universe and brought it into existence out of nothing. But this just begs the question of what created God--and if God does not need a creator, logic dictates that neither does the universe. Science deals with natural (not supernatural) causes and, as such, has several ways of exploring where the “something” came from.
[More]

[/url]

New Yorkers who look up today can catch a glimpse of history. The Enterprise space shuttle will be flown along the Hudson River and around the metropolitan area on its way to John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, a stopover on its final journey to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in Manhattan. A modified Boeing 747 is ferrying the shuttle from its former home in Washington, D.C.
[More]

[/url]

Warmer air allows for more water vapor. So scientists have long predicted that global warming will result in a more intense water cycle --the process by which water evaporates from the oceans, travels through the atmosphere and then falls as rain. Now new measurements of the ocean's salinity prove that prediction --and suggest that global warming strengthens the water cycle even more than anticipated.
[More]

[/url]

For decades now physicists have contemplated the idea of an entire shadow world of elementary particles, called supersymmetry. It would elegantly solve mysteries that the current Standard Model of particle physics leaves unexplained, such as what cosmic dark matter is. Now some are starting to wonder. The most powerful collider in history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has yet to see any new phenomena that would betray an unseen level of reality. Although the search has only just begun, it has made some theorists ask what physics might be like if supersymmetry is not true after all.
[More]

[/url]

Earth is under siege from outer space! In a way. We get peppered by speedy particles, called cosmic rays, all the time. Some come from the sun, some from supernovas and some via solar-style winds emanating from far-off massive stars. Anything that can accelerate a proton to nearly light speed does the trick.
[More]

[/url]