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Have a spare polar icebreaker lying around? The National Science Foundation would like to hear from you.

MassMotion puts a large, intelligent, 3-D crowd into a building's design and finds out where you need bigger doors or more escalators. Humans react in a seemingly irrational manner during emergency evacuations; sometimes, people even get trampled in the process. But what if architects and developers could predict how large crowds might move through their buildings in the event of an emergency--and then tweak the designs to ensure that everything runs smoothly

(PhysOrg.com) -- The largest and most complex scientific instrument yet to be fitted to the International Space Station was installed today. Taken into space by the Space Shuttle, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer will sift ten thousand cosmic-ray hits every minute, looking for nature’s best-kept particle secrets.

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine The International Space Station (ISS) is just one space-shuttle flight away from completion, but the construction boom in low-Earth orbit looks set to continue for at least another decade.

By David Cyranoski of Nature magazine The International Space Station (ISS) is just one space-shuttle flight away from completion, but the construction boom in low-Earth orbit looks set to continue for at least another decade. [More]

“The type of accident that is occurring in Japan is known as the station blackout: loss of off-site AC power--power lines are down--and then a subsequent failure of emergency power on-site, the diesel generators. The station blackout has been one of the great concerns for decades.” Physicist Ken Bergeron, speaking on March 12 during a press briefing. He worked on nuclear reactor accident analysis at Sandia National Laboratories.