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Lawmakers grilled NASA chief Charles Bolden today (March 21), saying the deep cuts to NASA's planetary science program in the agency's 2013 budget request will "cannibalize" future Mars exploration and threaten America's leadership in space. [More]

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The alphabet of data processing could include more elements than the "0" and "1" in future. An international research team has achieved a new kind of bit with single electrons, called quantum bits, or qubits. With them, considerably more than two states can be defined

The Mongol hordes led by Genghis Khan carved out the largest contiguous land empire history has ever witnessed, reaching at its apex from Asia's Pacific coast to eastern Europe and down into Persia and southeastern Asia. Although conventional wisdom suggests drought may have pushed them across the steppe to conquer more bountiful lands, ancient, long-dead trees discovered in a forbidding lava field in Mongolia give evidence that unprecedented rains might actually have helped fuel their expansion. [More]

I woke up, bleary-eyed, to news that would change my week: A corpse plant was about to bloom at Cornell University. In other words, the most amazing thing I could imagine was unfolding, literally, down the street from my house. The corpse plant has the largest unbranched blossom in the world

In the consumer-tech sense, friction is inconvenience. It's a hassle--steps that stand between you and what you want to buy or do.

The behaviour of some of the most elusive particles in the known universe can be simulated using three atoms in a lab, researchers at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore have found.

Physicists who have studied the mixing between two incompatible fluids have found that it is possible to control the undercurrents of one circulating fluid to optimise its exposure to the other. This work, which is about to be published in European Physical Journal E, was performed by Jorge Peixinho from CNRS at Le Havre University, France, and his colleagues from the Benjamin Levich Institute, City University of New York, USA.

The spiraling cost of satellite programs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has lawmakers from both parties sniffing around for a strategy to trim the agency's budget. [More]

(PhysOrg.com) -- Some physicists today are investigating the possibility of using molecular magnets as information storage units in future quantum computers.

Honey is awesome. I ve found its best consumed when combined with nougat and wrapped in dark chocolate but I digress. [More]

By Helen Pearson of Nature magazine Halfway through breakfast, Joe Thornton gets a call from his freezer.

(PhysOrg.com) -- The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has set a new record for a laser shot. This past week, its combined 192 lasers fired a single 1.875-megajoule shot into an empty test chamber.

By Carina Dennis of Nature magazine Mouse 'avatars' could in future allow physicians to find the most effective cocktail of cancer drugs to combat a particular tumor before giving them to a patient, according to researchers at the annual meeting of the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in Australia last week. "Using a personalized cancer avatar makes it possible to try out different combinations and make some mistakes before going into the clinic," says Edison Liu, president of HUGO and head of the Jackson Laboratory at Bar Harbor in Maine

Tourists who drift aimlessly during a sightseeing tour are moving randomly - just like electrons that move from one atom to the next. To obtain a better understanding of these random motions it is often useful to reduce their complexity. Physicists do this by simulating random walks