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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)

The Most Distant Light in the Universe?

The little smudge in the telescope images may be the most distant object ever seen -- a dying star, exploding in what astrophysicists call a gamma-ray burst, 13.065 billion light-years from Earth. Since the Big Bang is currently estimated to...

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April 28, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (70)

Industry Group Disregarded Own Scientists on Climate

Even the name of the Global Climate Coalition was confusing. It sounded like an environmental group -- not far different, say, from "The Climate Project," which was started by Al Gore. In reality, the GCC was an industry group that...

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April 24, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (54)

The Search for Another Earth

To astronomers looking for life elsewhere in the universe, the holy grail would be an Earth-like planet orbiting in the so-called "habitable zone" around its host star, where the temperature might be right for liquid water. That is why they...

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April 21, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (23)

Convergence Gone Mad?

Has it come to this? We've all seen cell phones with built-in cameras, phones with browsers, phones with music players...but a phone with a built-in electric razor? Oh, maybe not. But it has people talking, and folks here asked me...

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April 17, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (11)

The Great Red Spot is Shrinking

The atmosphere of Jupiter is a swirling, violent, ever-changing brew of gases, but for 300 years astronomers have puzzled over the Great Red Spot -- a giant cyclone (actually an anti-cyclone, since the pressure in it appears higher than the...

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April 2, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (38)

Conficker Worm: D-Day

This, being April 1, is the day the Conficker computer worm was supposed to seek whatever instructions it was supposed to get from its author, somewhere out there on the Internet. Security firms -- and every technology reporter on the...

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April 1, 2009 | Permalink | User Comments (27)