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What Do We Tell the Children?

"We’re okay, our family's okay, I always reassure them, but the way we stay okay is to be really careful about how we spend our money." Jeanette Stoneman, mother of five from Hamden, Conn., said this is how she talks...

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November 26, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

New! Shiny! Useless?

A reader who called him/herself Worz13 left a provocative comment in response to my little experience with the BlackBerry Storm: "As this is a science and society blog, can anyone actually explain why people have always got to have the...

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November 25, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (12)

Taking the World by Storm

I've spent a couple of days with the new BlackBerry Storm, the just-released handheld that may be the first serious competition to Apple's iPhone. It was grueling. My thumb prints are all over the test model we were sent. Somebody...

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November 21, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (9)

Mushrooms in Space

When the first Star Wars film appeared in 1977, it was a revelation: things in space could be...grimy, or smelly, or worn-out. Remember the trash compactor scene? This was no news to actual astronauts of the time, who gamely spent...

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November 21, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (39)

The Vision

President Bush and his staff thought they were reinvigorating the American spirit of exploration when they proposed the "Vision for Space Exploration." They wanted NASA retiring the space shuttles by 2010, returning to the moon by 2020, and eventually sending...

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November 18, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (11)

Mission Endeavour

(Update: 8:25 p.m. EST) Space Shuttle Endeavour lit up the sky at the Kennedy Space Center as it launched tonight, racing up the east coast of the United States on its way to orbit Seven astronauts are on board. Their...

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November 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (11)

How McCain Won (or Could Have)

According to the totals so far, Barack Obama won the election by something more than 8.4 million votes. But Mike Sheppard says the margin that really matters was only 445,912. Sheppard, you may recall from a previous post, is a...

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November 14, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (48)

Requiem for a Robot: Mars Probe Dies

(Updated 4:00 p.m EST) Phoenix Mars Lander, the plucky little ship that was sent to land in the Martian Arctic in May, has fallen silent. A source at NASA confirmed it this afternoon, and mission managers talked about it at...

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November 10, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (19)

Jurassic Park, the Sequel

The whole premise of "Jurassic Park" was preposterous on its face. Making clones of long-dead animals? We know better. But now a Japanese team has taken -- let's say, a step. They report, in this week's Proceedings of the National...

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November 4, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (37)

"Lifelong Republican" EPA Chiefs Back Obama

There is a man-bites-dog quality to this story: the first two administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency, both appointed by President Nixon in the 1970s, say they are voting Democratic this year. "We are lifelong Republicans," write William Ruckelshaus and...

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November 3, 2008 | Permalink | User Comments (10)