The Mystery of the Soay Sheep

The island of Hirta, in the St. Kilda archipelago off the northwest coast of Scotland, is an uninhabited, windswept place, perfect for studying the wild sheep who live there. British researchers have been watching them for 25 years, and report...

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July 2, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (9)

Blowin' in the Wind

Every time someone talks about the world's need to move on from coal and oil as its main energy sources, the next sentence seems to be that "there is no magic bullet." No one source, they say, can take the...

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June 23, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (31)

'Seize All Opportunities'

This release today from the National Academy of Sciences: "In a joint statement today, the science academies of the G8 countries, plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, called on their leaders to 'seize all opportunities' to address global...

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June 11, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

Doing Blackflips

Two tidbits: 1) The newest space tourist is Guy Laliberte, a onetime street performer from Quebec who became a billionaire by founding Cirque du Soleil. His pet project is called the One Drop Foundation, a charity devoted to ensuring clean...

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June 4, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (0)

A Matter of Curiosity

Clara Ma -- or at least her imagination -- will begin a very long journey in 2011. She's the winner of a contest run by NASA to give a more poetic name to the Mars Science Laboratory, a 2,000-pound, $2...

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May 27, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (5)

Cap and Trade

The House Energy Committee worked late last night. There was a lot of compromise, a lot of horse trading. But in the end they voted, 33-25, in favor of a bill that would create the first federally-mandated system to curb...

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May 22, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (21)

"Missing Link" Found? No, But it's a Cool Fossil

Ida, the 47-million-year-old primate fossil found in Germany and unveiled on Tuesday, is a no-question big moment in paleontology. But we noticed that the lead search term today in Google Trends was "Missing Link found" -- and that's a reasonable...

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May 20, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (31)

Sunstruck

Take a close look at the image of the sun provided by NASA The agency says it was shot from Florida on Tuesday. The dark speck is not a sunspot, or a planet, or dirt on the lens. Click on...

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May 15, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (13)

Busy Signal

While Apple, with its iPhone, was generating a lot of buzz (and selling its billionth app), Ross Rubin of the market research firm NPD Group reports that the BlackBerry Curve actually outsold it in the first quarter of the year....

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May 4, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (11)

Room for Four

After five years of planning, testing, designing and re-designing, NASA has decided its new Orion spacecraft -- the conical capsule reminiscent of Apollo -- will probably not be quite what they'd hoped. Gina Sunseri, reporting for us from Houston, sends...

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April 30, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (40)