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Recovery.gov: Your Tax Dollars at Work

How to you keep track of $797 billion? When the stimulus package was passed last winter, the government promised that citizens would be able to use a new Web site, Recovery.gov, to find out where money was being sent. It...

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September 28, 2009 in Current Affairs, economy, Web/Tech | Permalink | User Comments (12)

Climate: Power Companies Quit U.S Chamber of Commerce

Electric companies, many of them with large investments in power plants that burn coal, oil or natural gas, might seem resistant at first glance to government mandates to control greenhouse gas emissions. But several have now been very public about...

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September 25, 2009 in Current Affairs, Politics, Science | Permalink | User Comments (5)

Ice on Mars: More Than They Ever Thought

Note to self: whenever you make a cool scientific finding, try not to do it on a day when there's an even cooler finding. Yesterday, while NASA was talking about those intriguing traces of water in the moon's soil, other...

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September 25, 2009 in Science, Space | Permalink | User Comments (12)

Red Mars, Black Mars

Why is Mars such a rusty red? For decades, scientists have assumed the answer was as simple as rust on Earth. The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, established that the planet once was probably warm and wet, with standing pools...

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September 21, 2009 in Science, Space | Permalink | User Comments (15)

A Rocky World, Far, Far Away

500 light-years away, in the constellation of Monoceros the Unicorn, European scientists say there is an unremarkable star called CoRoT-7. Last year they deduced that there was at least one planet orbiting it. And today, they report, it is one...

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September 16, 2009 in Science, Space | Permalink | User Comments (16)

Space Shuttle Dodges a (Big) Bullet

The astronauts of the space shuttle Discovery woke up a little while ago, and Houston told them to go on with their lives as if nothing was happening. A piece of a European Ariane 5 rocket, launched three years ago...

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September 3, 2009 in Science, Space | Permalink | User Comments (5)

California Burning

If you live outside southern California, and you want an idea of why the wildfires there are such news, take a look from above. This image, shot by NASA's Aqua satellite, shows a plume of smoke that extends diagonally northeast...

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September 1, 2009 in Science, Space | Permalink | User Comments (4)