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The View

If you have two minutes and 40 seconds to spare, you may want to use it to enjoy the visual treat below. The space shuttle Discovery landed safely on Saturday afternoon, but before it came home it shot this video...

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March 30, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (9)

The Kindness of Strangers

They began to show up after the Challenger disaster. In 1988, during NASA's first shuttle flight after the accident, a bouquet of roses was delivered to Mission Control in Houston. Seven red ones, plus one white. There was a note...

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March 27, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (28)

A Galactic Battle … Against Salmonella

ABC News' Brian Hartman and Cullen Dirner report: The war against salmonella is also being waged in outer space. While Earth-bound government workers struggle to regulate deadly illnesses out of the food system, NASA's high-flying astronauts are running experiments on...

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March 24, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (9)

www.ShareEverything.com

The dirty little secret of Web 2.0 -- the version in which users like you create much of the content -- is that companies have been trying for years to "monetize" it, and mostly failing. Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg and...

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March 23, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

Present at the Creation

Twenty years ago, at a lab in Switzerland, a young British software engineer sent out a memo suggesting a new information management system for his employer, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The engineer's name was Tim Berners-Lee,...

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March 18, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (14)

Password-Protected

You sign up for a new e-mail account or go online at your bank. It asks you to make up a password. "Passwords must be at least six characters, and contain at least one capital letter, one lower-case letter, and...

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March 12, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (16)

Follow the Water

For several tantalizing months last year, NASA's Phoenix Mars spacecraft sent back images from the Martian Arctic of what scientists were pretty sure was ice. Water -- the stuff of life -- frozen in the red soil. Now, a team...

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March 11, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (25)

Bush Environment Chief Joins Power Company

James Connaughton, who chaired the White House Council on Environmental Quality in the Bush administration, has joined Constellation Energy, a major power company that also specializes in the shipping and selling of coal. He'll be executive vice president for corporate...

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March 5, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (8)

Eight is More than Enough

The story of the California octuplets got more than its share of play, and raised more than its share of hackles -- especially when it came to light that the mother had gone to a fertility specialist to have multiple...

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March 4, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (28)

Big Catch

Some years ago I went to Newfoundland, where the local economy, built on fishing, had all but collapsed, and a shaken fisherman told a psychologist what he thought was the reason. "My God," the therapist quoted him as saying. "We've...

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March 2, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (11)