Science

HAT CREEK, CALIF.--From the perspective of an extraterrestrial, I wonder if there would be much difference between a human and a deer.

You might think that's an odd question, but on Wednesday, as I stood in an open plain here, at around 5,000 feet, with Mount Shasta visible far off to the north, a stunning blue sky, I watched a deer poking around at the base of what on its own would be an odd piece of astronomy equipment.

In fact, though, the 20-foot-diameter antenna the deer was investigating was just one of 42 identical units that … Read more

More scientists and engineers are about to join the international race to the moon sponsored by Google and the X Prize Foundation.

The foundation announced Thursday it will introduce two new Google Lunar X Prize teams to its already weighty roster of 14 competitors. The announcement will be made Tuesday via a teleconference from Google headquarters. Although the X Prize Foundation organizes a number of innovation competitions, the Google Lunar X Prize is sponsored in conjunction with Google.

Team LunaTrex will also have an announcement to make at that time, according to the foundation.

Then on Wednesday, Google and the … Read more

NASA said Wednesday that it has made available a series of video updates on the Ares rocket program available to the public via iTunes.

There are 10 videos--which have been produced quarterly since August 2006--in the series. NASA's move Wednesday means that all 10 will be viewable on Apple's service immediately, with forthcoming progress reports to be added as they are finished.

The Ares rocket is the space agency's next-generation launch vehicle, intended to carry the Orion crew capsule--and its astronauts--to the moon, as well as to the International Space Station.

The first space station launch is … Read more

Fans of the planet Jupiter have something new to get excited about.

On Monday, NASA announced that it is planning to launch a mission, titled Juno, to conduct a large-scale survey of our solar system's biggest planet.

According to NASA, the new mission will involve an unmanned spacecraft that is planned for an August 2011 launch onboard an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It is expected that the rocket will reach its destination, orbit around Jupiter, in 2016.

Once there, the plan is for the spacecraft to orbit Jupiter 32 times over the course of a year at … Read more

MOFFETT FIELD, Calif.--NASA celebrated the 75th anniversary of this iconic airfield and research center on Friday by dedicating a brand-new zeppelin from a private company called Airship Ventures.

The zeppelin NT ("new technology"), which is one of just three currently functioning zeppelins that exist in the world, and the biggest, at 246 feet, was named "Eureka," a name that relates to the fact that the ship is based in California, as well as the fact that it is "rooted in scientific principles," said Brian Bell, a co-founder of Airship Ventures, the ship's … Read more

IBM and five university partners have been awarded a DARPA contract to work on a cognitive computing project that will, essentially, attempt to simulate the brain's power and efficiency.

According to Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, the idea is for him and his team to try to re-create the brain's perception, cognitive, sensation, interaction, and action abilities, while also simulating its efficient size and low-power consumption.

"The mind has an uncanny ability to integrate information from a variety of sensors, such as sight, hearing, touch, smell and can create categories of time, … Read more

When the Space Shuttle Endeavour launches Friday afternoon, assuming it is not delayed, the astronauts onboard and the technicians on the ground at mission control will have at their disposal new software that could streamline the process of problem reporting and analysis.

The software, called the Problem Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action (PRACA) system, was created by the Human-Computer Interaction Group at NASA's Ames Research Center, and is designed to give a wide cross-section of people in the Space Shuttle ecosystem access to a single database package for tracking problems with the Shuttle and its associated infrastructure.

According to … Read more

I was thinking recently about the many problems facing our fragile planet--economic crisis, global warming, massive water shortages, and so on--and got to wondering what can be done to solve them.

In part, this stemmed from the recent American election and what it meant for our country and the world, but also from thinking about the ongoing alternate-reality game being run by the Institute for the Future, Superstruct, which tasks players with coming up with ideas that could help stave off a fictional extinction of the human race.

One problem, it seems to me, is that there are so many … Read more

If you're the kind of person who wants to do research on the International Space Station, it appears that you may need to cross some boundaries of taste many of us wouldn't even consider.

According to a BBC News story Friday, the crew aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour, which is scheduled to launch from the Kennedy Space Center on Friday afternoon, will be handing off to their Space Station colleagues a water regeneration system designed to, among other things, recycle urine for reuse as fresh water.

The system, which will ionize, filter, distill, and oxidize wastewater, "will … Read more