flickering pictures

According to new data from a U.S. military satellite, the ionosphere — the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space — is lower than it used to be, meaning the sky is quite literally falling. The Air Force’s “Communications and Navigation Outage Forecasting System” satellite — C/NOFS for short — uses nifty-sounding instruments like an ion [...]

[Read more →]

The Los Angeles Times reports that peeling a strip of Scotch tape off the roll in a vacuum chamber releases enough energy to x-ray your finger. The process is called triboluminescence and apparently creates visible light, too — something you can try at home — though you likely haven’t noticed unless you’ve been taping things [...]

[Read more →]

We don’t know what it was, what it was made of, or how much mass it held. It didn’t act like a supernova and wasn’t even in a galaxy, as far as we can tell. All we’re sure of is that it radiated a light spectrum we’ve never seen before, was really far away, and [...]

[Read more →]

You’ve got to figure that if anything goes wrong in this room, that guy’s hard hat isn’t going to be good for much. Articles have popped up all over the media about this wonderful new large hadron collider thing, but I had to go to Wikipedia and beyond to gain any real insight into what [...]

[Read more →]

Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not. This could be a huge breakthrough for clean, green solar power, since critics have long [...]

[Read more →]

A new study apparently shows that the birth control pill messes with a woman’s pheromone recognition process, making her more likely to be attracted to men who are genetically similar to her. That’s a bad thing — broad genetic diversity minimizes nature’s “mistakes,” and children resulting from parents with similar genes are more likely to [...]

[Read more →]

Researchers at UC Berkeley have diverted light around three-dimensional objects in a way that gives the impression they aren’t there — a lot like a Star Trek-style cloaking device, and that guy on the right. Science is cool. From the Guardian: Researchers funded by the Pentagon have managed to make material that has the potential [...]

[Read more →]

From an exchange between the eminently reasonable British Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (Peter Sellers) and the lunatic hothead American Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), in the movie Dr. Strangelove (1964): Ripper: Mandrake? Mandrake: Yes, Jack? Ripper: Have you ever seen a Commie drink a glass of water? Mandrake: Well, I can’t say I [...]

[Read more →]

From the Telegraph: Viruses are glorified scraps of genetic code that are exquisitely designed to pirate a host to reproduce: the common cold virus needs cells in the nose and respiratory tract to reproduce, before being spread with a sneeze. But the discovery of a giant virus that itself falls ill through infection by another [...]

[Read more →]

We’ve known for a long time that there’s an awful lot of water in space. Comets send huge amounts of the stuff hurtling every which way, and just last Thursday NASA extracted water from Martian soil for the very first time. But because the universe is, for the most part, really really cold, nearly all [...]

[Read more →]