Since the space age began, the orbital realm has become increasingly littered with the detritus of skyward human striving--spent rocket boosters, dead satellites, stray pieces of hardware. Debris is piling up with such speed that it has become a threat to the kind of spacefaring endeavors that spawned it in the first place. A September report by the National Research Council found that the debris field is so dense that collisions between objects in orbit will create additional debris faster than space junk falls out of orbit.
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As Britain was dangerously close to defeat in 1940, Winston Churchill put the English language into battle. He inspired the people of Great Britain with his defiant, heroic speeches, rousing challenges that were full of hope, humor and direction.
Read More »Japanese Team Wins Australian Solar Car Race
CANBERRA (Reuters) - A team from Japan won a world solar car race through Australia's outback on Thursday, after battling more than 3,000 km (1,800 miles) of remote highways, dodging kangaroos and other wildlife and avoiding a bushfire. Race officials said the team from Tokai University, near Tokyo, finished the race from the northern city of Darwin to the southern city of Adelaide at about noon on Thursday. [More]
Read More »Go for Broke: How Bill Joy Handicaps "Greentech" Investments
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--What does it take to pick a winner in the slowly unfolding field of renewable energy ? For starters, alternatives to oil must be able to stand up on their own at some point, without a need for permanent government subsidies, said Bill Joy, once a heavy hitter in the information technology industry and now a partner in investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s greentech practice.
Read More »Non-Profit Agency Proposes Cholera Vaccine Plan for Haiti
* Partners in Health to start vaccinating in January * Move follows months of debate over vaccine option [More]
Read More »Hairdressers Can Be Skin Cancer Detectors
Humans have mostly abandoned the grooming strategies of our chimp cousins. So there's a good chance your scalp and the back of your head go largely unexamined. But this inattention can leave skin cancers undetected
Read More »Is being a good scientist a matter of what you do or of what you feel in your heart?
If the question posed in the title of the post seems to you to have an obvious answer, sit tight while I offer a situation in which it might be less obvious. We recently discussed philosopher Karl Popper’s efforts to find the line of demarcation between science and pseudo-science .
Read More »Moon Not Made of Cheese, Physicist Explains
“How do you know the moon is not made of green cheese?” Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll at the ScienceWriters2011 conference in Flagstaff on October 17th. [More]
Read More »Should Car Ads Be Banned?
Never happen. But maybe they should be
Read More »Cities Will Feel Brunt as Global Population Passes 7 Billion
NEW YORK -- What would the world look like with 7 billion human beings in the mix, vying for resources? Pretty much what it looks like now. That's because the planet is about to pass the 7 billion mark any day now.
Read More »The Mainstreaming Of Fair Trade
If you didn't know what Fair Trade was five years ago, you certainly do now. As the label becomes ubiquitous, CEO Paul Rice is taking the standard into new industries and to new heights.
Read More »Longevity Shown for First Time to Be Inherited via Non-DNA Mechanism
In October 2009, Stanford University geneticist Anne Brunet was sitting in her office when a graduate student came to her with a slightly heretical question.
Read More »Preliminary Human Experiments to Test Safety of Nerve Cell Transplants for Spinal Cord Paralysis
ROCKVILLE, Md.--A new experiment aimed at achieving actor Christopher Reeve's dream of finding an effective treatment for spinal paralysis was announced this week at an international meeting of scientists and people with spinal cord injury sponsored by the United 2 Fight Paralysis Foundation. The approach, which already is shown to be promising in animals and avoids the need for patients to take immunosuppressive drugs, has not yet been proved effective in humans. Nonetheless, patients are excited to see this advance as they have been frustrated waiting for the first human trials of the new approach
Read More »Quantum Levitation-where science videos don’t get any cooler!
This video demonstrating the power of superconductivity has been making the rounds this week and is an example of how video is really the best way to capture and share with thousands of viewers the amazing power of science! You will notice that the video is a demonstration without the science explained live.
Read More »Launch of 2 Satellites Thursday Will Enable 1st Test of Rival to GPS
By Geoff Brumfiel of Nature magazine Galileo, the largest program ever launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) will enter its latest phase with the launch of two navigation satellites on 20 October. [More]
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