Category Archives: Science

NASA patches air-purifying system on station

By doris | Published: July 27, 2009

Full Story at msnbc.com CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A space station air purifier was working again Sunday after it shut down at the worst possible time, when company was still visiting and had swollen the on-board crowd to a record 13. The repair by flight controllers, albeit temporary, came as a great relief to NASA. [...]

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Teen diagnoses her own disease in science class

By doris | Published: June 12, 2009

Full Story At CNN.com Her doctors, no matter how hard they tried, couldn’t figure out the cause of Jessica’s abdominal distress. Then one day in January, Terry, 18, figured it out on her own. In her Advanced Placement high school science class, she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue [...]

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When Medicine Meets Marketing

By doris | Published: December 15, 2008

Full Story At  Newsweek.com Dallas Hextell was just a baby when his parents bought him a walker—not because he was late reaching a milestone, but because they worried he might never toddle on his own. At 9 months he had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a form of brain injury caused by oxygen deprivation in [...]

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Scientist says ancient technique cuts greenhouse gas

By doris | Published: December 7, 2008

Full Story At  Reuters OZNAN, Poland (Reuters) – An ancient technique of plowing charred plants into the ground to revive soil may also trap greenhouse gases for thousands of years and forestall global warming, scientists said on Friday. Heating plants such as farm waste or wood in airtight conditions produces a high-carbon substance called biochar, [...]

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“Big Bang” collider repairs to cost up to $29 million

By doris | Published: December 5, 2008

Full Story At  Reuters GENEVA (Reuters) – Repairing the giant particle collider built to simulate the “Big Bang” could cost up to 35 million Swiss francs ($29 million), the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) said on Friday. Announcing a further delay to the Large Hadron Collider’s resumption, now expected in summer, CERN spokesman James [...]

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Eye on the Earth

By doris | Published: November 25, 2008

Full Story At  washingtonpost.com A glimpse of our changing natural environment and how humans may be impacting it.

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Pentagon Clears Flying-Car Project for Takeoff

By doris | Published: November 22, 2008

Full Story At Wired.com Pentagon mad-science division Darpa is helping build thought-controlled robotic limbs, artificial pack mules, real-life laser guns and “kill-proof” soldiers. So it comes as no surprise, really, that the agency is now getting into the flying-car business, too. Darpa hopes its “Personal Air Vehicle Technology” project, announced yesterday, will ultimately lead to [...]

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Giant deposits of ice found by Mars orbiter

By doris | Published: November 21, 2008

Full Story At  Chron.com – Houston Chronicle Scientists led by a University of Texas geologist report that data from an unmanned NASA space probe suggests there’s much more ice on Mars than previously thought. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, according to an article in the journal Science, has identified several dirt-covered glaciers — including one that [...]

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Astronaut loses tool bag during spacewalk

By doris | Published: November 19, 2008

Full Story At  CNN.com (CNN) — Things didn’t go quite according to plan for astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper during her spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Tuesday.Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper maneuvers by the tail of the docked space shuttle Endeavour. Astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper maneuvers by the tail of the docked space shuttle Endeavour. First, a grease [...]

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A computer 55,000 times faster than your PC

By doris | Published: November 17, 2008

Full Story At  msnbc.com at Oak Ridge National Laboratory? If everyone in the world performed one mathematical calculation per second, it would take 650 years to do what this machine can do in one day. That makes the $100 million computer, nicknamed “Jaguar” by scientists, the fastest in the world for unclassified scientific research. At [...]

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Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren’t Really Looking for Him

By doris | Published: November 13, 2008

 Full Story At ABC News When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret crush from high school had looked [...]

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Fast Food: Just Another Name for Corn

By doris | Published: November 12, 2008

Full Story At Wired.com That the $100-billion fast food industry rests on a foundation of corn has been known more through inference and observation than hard scientific fact — until now. Chemical analysis from restaurants across the United States shows that nearly every cow or chicken used in fast food is raised on a diet [...]

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Strange New World: Tech Picks of the Week

By doris | Published: November 9, 2008

Full Story At  ABC News: Now that all that election stuff is over, it’s time to get back to the tech news that we know and love.nationwide wifiThe FCC’s recent decision to approve a merger between Sprint and Clearwater means that a nationwide WiMax network could be on the way. Sprint already launched its Xohm [...]

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Could a hot air balloon help map Saturn moon?

By doris | Published: November 7, 2008

Full Story At – Space.com- msnbc.com A hot air balloon drifts gently in the breeze, gliding over mountain ranges and vast lakes. Thick clouds extend over the entire horizon, threatening rain. The meager light that filters through illuminates one side of the balloon, making it look like a giant question mark in the sky. This [...]

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Nobel Prize in chemistry commends finding and use of green fluorescent protein

By doris | Published: October 12, 2008

Full Story At Science News Making cells glow with a protein borrowed from jellyfish is one of the brightest ideas in chemistry. At least that is what the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences implied when it announced October 8 that the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry would be awarded to three scientists who were instrumental [...]

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DNA fingerprinting could reveal your surname

By doris | Published: October 8, 2008

msnbc.com LONDON – Police could one day determine the surname of male suspects or victims of crime from DNA alone, British researchers said on Wednesday. Scientists at Leicester University, where DNA fingerprinting was invented in 1984, said they had demonstrated that men with the same surname were highly likely to be genetically linked. The finding [...]

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Tobacco Could Hold the Key to Revolutionary Gene Therapy

By doris | Published: September 4, 2008

Full Story At Wired.com After centuries of giving humanity little more than nicotine and death, the tobacco plant may be the wellspring of a revolution in gene therapy. Scientists are using a modified tobacco virus to deliver delicate gene therapies into the heart of diseased cells, with the potential to treat most cancers, viruses and [...]

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802.11n brings faster wireless Net access

By doris | Published: September 3, 2008

Full Story At msnbc.com Shopping for a computer can be fun. Shopping for a wireless router? Not so much, especially when you have to decipher a combination of numbers and letters that may seem harder to interpret than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Do you go with 802.11g or 802.11n? The latter is showing up in [...]

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Nasa considers shuttle shelf-life

By doris | Published: August 31, 2008

Full Story At BBC NEWS | Nasa will study whether the space shuttle can operate beyond its planned retirement in 2010, reports say. The agency will look at what might be required to delay the retirement of its fleet until the shuttle’s replacement – Ares-Orion – begins flying in 2015. The exercise is aimed at [...]

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Cells change identity in promising breakthrough

By doris | Published: August 27, 2008

Full Story At Yahoo! News NEW YORK – Talk about an extreme makeover: Scientists have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward the goal of growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases.ADVERTISEMENT The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns [...]

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