Paleontologists in China have unearthed fossils of the largest feathered creature ever found, a 1.4 ton dinosaur that was an early cousin of Tyrannosaurus rex.
Want to study the more than 2000 exoplanets so far discovered by Kepler? There’s now an app to do it!
Another wise investment of the Obama administration: The world’s largest solar power project, recipient of the second largest ever Department of Energy loan guarantee, has filed for bankruptcy.
Update and correction: It turns out that the company was offered the DOE loan guarantee, but turned it down. Read this second article. The facts it describe make the decisions of the Obama administration seem beyond foolish.
Considering how easily this Muslim scientist apparently participated in conversations with terrorists where he casually discussed the idea of suicide bombings, his description of himself tells us quite a lot about Islam in general.
Ten amazing treetop walkways from around the world.
The science leaders on the team that announced faster-than-light neutrinos at CERN last year have stepped down.
Life imitates pulp fiction: A report describing the memories of an 80-year-old former U.S. Marine has provided the Chinese a clue to the whereabouts of the missing bones of Peking Man.
Want to see where the wind is blowing? Check out this website, which shows an animated map of the wind patterns blowing across the continental United States, continually updated.
The uncertainty of science: Geologists have uncovered a variable in the amount of uranium in rocks that will increase the margin of error for dating events hundreds of millions of years ago.
Is it snowing microbes on Enceladus?
“More than 90 jets of all sizes near Enceladus’s south pole are spraying water vapor, icy particles, and organic compounds all over the place,” says Carolyn Porco, an award-winning planetary scientist and leader of the Imaging Science team for NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. “Cassini has flown several times now through this spray and has tasted it. And we have found that aside from water and organic material, there is salt in the icy particles. The salinity is the same as that of Earth’s oceans.”
Enceladus’s gushing geysers, as seen by Cassini.
A solar tornado five times the size of the Earth.
The Russians are building nuclear powered engines for long range space travel, and announced today that they expect to have the first engine ready by 2017.
An incandescent light bulb, stored in a time capsule for one hundred years, still worked!
I wonder: Did the EPA try to arrest anyone for using it?
Based on discoveries already made, astronomers now estimate there are probably more than a hundred habitable superEarths within 30 light years of the Sun.
The first look at the ocean’s deepest bottom.
Cameron’s video reminds me of the surface of Venus as photographed by the Soviet Union’s Venera spacecraft in the 1970s and 1980s, flat and crushed by the heavy surface pressure.
This is getting repetitive: Global warming models wrong again.
An evening pause: Driving across the Wabash Cannonball Bridge going from Indiana to Illinois. The bridge is single lane, with a wooden deck, and over a hundred years old.
What’s really cool is how the driver is able to drive while holding his camera overhead through his sun roof.
Some history comes to Earth: The first Russian weather satellite, launched in 1969, is about to burn up in the atmosphere.
Not only that, but the U.S. research satellite Explorer 8, launched in 1960, is also about to come down.
James Cameron has safely returned to the surface after completing the world’s deepest solo dive.
James Cameron has set a new record for the deepest solo dive, a depth of 35,756 feet.
And he is still down there at this moment.
Hovering in what he’s called a vertical torpedo, Cameron is likely collecting data, specimens, and imagery unthinkable in 1960, when the only other explorers to reach Challenger Deep returned after seeing little more than the silt stirred up by their bathyscaphe. After as long as six hours in the trench, Cameron—best known for creating fictional worlds on film (Avatar, Titanic, The Abyss)—is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface. Meanwhile, the expedition’s scientific support team awaits his return aboard the research ships Mermaid Sapphire and Barakuda, 7 miles (11 kilometers) up.
The uncertainty of science: A new chemical analysis of lunar rocks from the Apollo missions has cast doubt on the consensus theory that the Moon was formed when the Earth was hit by a Mars-sized object about 4.5 billion years ago.
New research shows that the Medieval Warm Period was a global event, reaching all the way to Antarctica.
Pseudo-scientists and global warming activists like Phil Jones and Michael Mann had argued that the warming was local, limited to Europe and parts of North America. The new data proves them wrong. Instead, the evidence shows that in the recent past, before the input of human technology, the Earth’s climate has naturally varied on global scales by significant amounts. And the most likely known cause for the Medieval Warm Period (c1000) and the Little Ice Age (c1600) that followed appears to be related to the Sun.
Mysterious cloud spotted on Mars by amateur astronomers.
A sign of the budgetary times: The Department of Energy has scrapped plans to build a neutrino experiment, costing $1.5 billion, in the now-closed Homestake gold mine in South Dakota.
An astronaut answers hundreds of questions about his flight to ISS on Reddit.
