Cool Science

Been looking for a reason to join Twitter, but haven’t been able to quite take the plunge? Forget Shaq and William Gibson: Alerts about asteroids cruising near Earth have come to Twitter. @AsteroidWatch will let you know any time a space rock gets within a few lunar distances. Much more asteroid info will be distributed [...]

From Maine to Florida, the Atlantic seaboard has experienced higher tides than expected this summer. At their peak in mid-June, the tides at some locations outstripped predictions by two feet. The change has come too fast to be attributed to melting ice sheets or anything quite that dramatic, and it’s a puzzle for scientists who’ve [...]

Just a few years after scientists warned of impending ocean apocalypse, a handful of simple management tools have pulled some of Earth’s fisheries back from the edge of collapse, according to a review of global fish populations and catch data. But though the big picture is brighter than before, many of the details remain dark. [...]

In the first deep sea drilling expedition designed to gather seismic data, scientists have successfully drilled nearly a mile beneath the ocean floor into one of the world’s most active earthquake zones. Researchers aboard the drilling vessel Chikyu — meaning “planet Earth” in Japanese — used a special technology called riser drilling to penetrate the [...]

Need an insider’s visitor guide to the northernmost settlement on Earth? NASA’s got you covered. Kasia Wegrzyn, a NASA scientist, has spent the past several weeks in Ny-Ålesund, a 35 person village in the Svalbard, a chain of islands halfway between Norway and the North Pole. She’s learned the ropes, tasted the boxed wine, and [...]

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station noticed two mysterious dark circles in the ice of Lake Baikal in April. Though the cause is more likely aqueous than alien, some aspects of the odd blemishes defy explanation. The two circles are the focal points for ice break-up and may be caused by upwelling of warmer water [...]

BERKELEY, California — A hundred years ago, zoologist Joseph Grinnell was thinking about you. Long before ENIAC or ARPANET, the visionary first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California-Berkeley was focused on preserving data for future generations. He and other research biologists fanned out across California trapping and preserving the [...]

The Department of Energy’s flagship “clean coal” power plant has a new lease on life, thanks to a billion dollars from last year’s stimulus package. The plan to build the plant, which will be the first large plant to capture and bury its carbon dioxide emissions in the ground, was scrapped by the Bush Administration [...]

Scientists have made a rare discovery — a new unnamed element for the Periodic Table. A gang of obviously very clever people have discovered a rare new element to stand proudly alongside Hydrogen, Barium and Krypton. Now, it needs a name. Sigurd Hofmann (one of the few newsworthy people you’ll see named “Sigurd”) at the [...]

A self-assembling molecule synthesized in a laboratory may resemble the earliest form of information-carrying biological material, a transitional stage between lifeless chemicals and the complex genetic architectures of life. Called tPNA, short for thioester peptide nucleic acids, the molecules spontaneously mimic the shape of DNA and RNA when mixed together. Left on their own, they [...]

The baby stars at the center of the galaxy had their first pictures taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting. How stars could form at the center of the galaxy has been a mystery. Space is generally a pretty harsh environment, but the galaxy’s heart is particularly brutal. [...]

For all the weapons deployed in the war on cancer, from chemicals to radiation to nanotechnology, the underlying strategy has remained the same: Detect and destroy, with no compromise given to the killer. But Robert Gatenby wants to strike a peace. A mathematical oncologist at the Moffitt Cancer Center, Gatenby is part of a new [...]

The genetic portrait of the novel swine flu strain that’s still spreading around the globe has been completed, but some mysteries remain. A huge international team of scientists sequenced the partial or full genomes of 51 samples of the virus from the United States and Mexico. While many genetic clues about the new H1N1 strain [...]

Data.gov launched today with 47 datasets from across the government. That’s a tiny fraction of the Feds’ gargantuan information stores, and the site is clearly in beta, but open-government advocates see the new site as a sign of good things to come for government transparency. “Data.gov says that our information is your information,” said Ellen [...]