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In the absence of NASA's Space Shuttle Program, private companies are left to fill the black hole of space exploration. Now, 50 years after John Glenn orbited the Earth, some very different kinds of explorers are leading the way. 1.

The price of gold affects more than global finances; it also drives the world's most toxic pollution problem, according to new research from the Blacksmith Institute , an environmental health group based in New York City. Miners in countries from across Africa and Southeast Asia use mercury to separate the precious metal from the surrounding rock and silt

Forget self-driving cars ; Nissan and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL) have teamed up to work on mind-reading vehicle technology. Truly hands-free driving may not be too far off. Thought control via brain machine interface isn't a new idea--EPFL researchers are already working on mind-reading wheelchair systems

Duke engineers have already shown that they can "cloak" light and sound, making objects invisible -- now, they have demonstrated the theoretical ability to significantly increase the efficiency of ships by tricking the surrounding water into staying still.

After an echolocating bat locks on to an insect with its sonar beam, it can keep track of its prey despite receiving a slew of echoes from other objects--leaves, vines and so on. How does it separate echoes bouncing off its target from echoes bouncing off the surrounding clutter, especially when the echoes reach the bat at the same time?

(PhysOrg.com) -- Suppose at some point the universe ceases to expand, and instead begins collapsing in on itself (as in the “Big Crunch” scenario), and eventually becomes a supermassive black hole. The black hole’s extreme mass produces an extremely strong gravitational field. Through a gravitational version of the so-called Schwinger mechanism, this gravitational field converts virtual particle-antiparticle pairs from the surrounding quantum vacuum into real particle-antiparticle pairs

For a limited time, the full text of this article is being made available for fans of Scientific American's page on Facebook. Read it now or become a fan . One hundred years ago, in June 1911, Robert Falcon Scott and 32 explorers--most of them British scientists, naval officers or seafarers--were huddled in the darkness of the Antarctic winter, when the sun never rises above the horizon and up to eight feet of ice seals the surrounding sea

Japan's Fukushima disaster did more than just ravage the surrounding area with radiation; it also freaked out every other country that relies on nuclear power. Germany's reaction was perhaps the strongest--the country is now working without three quarters (16 GW) of its nuclear power while plants undergo safety reviews (some plants are offline for maintenance outages). How is the country faring

GTherm's new technology solves the unfortunate side effect of harvesting the Earth's heat--serious tremors.

A team of researchers at MIT has found a way to manipulate both the thermal conductivity and the electrical conductivity of materials simply by changing the external conditions, such as the surrounding temperature. And the technique they found can change electrical conductivity by factors of well over 100, and heat conductivity by more than threefold.

Gold-hungry Peruvian miners are eroding the country's portion of the Amazon rainforest at an alarming rate, according to a new study. Small-scale gold panners in the Andean nation have responded to soaring gold prices by revving up the pace of gold mining, stripping the region of its forests.

(PhysOrg.com) -- When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on -- until now.

A new coating for concrete structures could result in seriously tough structures that better resist damage and thus saves money in reconstruction and repair. Better yet, the coating relies on waste ash from burning coal in power stations.

IBM Yorktown Heights, New York | Photograph by Reed Young David Ferrucci Principal Investigator - Watson Project, IBM Yorktown Heights, New York The principal investigator for IBM's DeepQA/Watson project, Ferrucci, 49, led the creation of the Jeopardy-playing robot, Watson.

There are reports that the U.S.