Science

Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen has launched a new company that will launch payloads into space from a monster aircraft. Allen's set up a new company, Stratolaunch Systems, for this project. He has revived his relationship with aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan to further his plans. Allen and ...

Scientists are getting very close to proving or disproving the existence of the subatomic particle known as the "Higgs boson." The list of possible hiding spots for the Higgs boson particle has been narrowed down, according to teams carrying out experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Geneva ...

One of the most-used leisure-oriented apps on my Android smartphones has been Google's free My Tracks. The app brilliantly measures data related to hikes and bike rides via the GPS radio. It tracks distance, speed, time, elevation, grade and so on. Pressing "Start" when setting off, and remembering ...

NASA's Kepler mission on Monday confirmed the discovery of a small planet 600 light-years away from Earth in the "habitable zone" of a star not unlike our own sun. About 2.4 times the size of Earth, the newly confirmed planet -- called "Kepler-22b" -- is the smallest yet found to orbit in the middle...

Following a one-day delay, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission featuring its new Curiosity rover is now scheduled for launch on Saturday, Nov. 26, from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Representing the largest and most advanced rover ever sent to the Red Planet, the automobile-sized C...

The international research team that found neutrinos traveling faster than light has done it again. It conducted another set of experiments and again found neutrinos that exceeded the speed of light. As in the first experiment, the researchers fired high-intensity, high-energy beams of muon neutrino...

A team of researchers led by Tobias Schaedler of HRL Labs has developed an ultralight metallic microlattice that's 10,000 times lighter than ultralight aerogels and carbon nanotube foams. Ultralight cellular materials weigh less than 10 milligrams per cubic centimeter. "An ordered lattice is inheren...

Although computers have been called "thinking machines," their internal operations have very little to do with how the original thinking machine -- the human brain -- actually works. That's changing, however, as some researchers at MIT and the University of Texas Medical School have demonstrated in ...

Google scientists are laboring away on futuristic projects in a top-secret lab somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, The New York Times claims. This lab, which is apparently so hush-hush that few Googlers even knew it existed prior to the report, is allegedly called "Google X." More than 100 futu...

At universities and companies around the globe, there are people plugging away trying to solve the myriad technological challenges of quantum computers. But that doesn't mean practical applications of quantum computing are some futuristic fantasy. Already, quantum technology is trickling into the re...

Any science fiction fan or Trekkie knows what tractor beams are -- those beams that pull objects toward the device that generates them, sort of like an invisible fishing line and reel. NASA believes enough in the possibility of creating real tractor beams that it's provided a $100,000 grant to resea...

Comparing an atom to a coin is like comparing a human heart to a repeatedly clinching fist. The analogy is woefully simplistic in relation to what is actually going on. But someone with a layman's understanding of the human body is unlikely to grasp the nuances of the human heart. Similarly, someone...

Good luck finding a nice, clean entry point to discuss quantum computers. It should come as no surprise, of course, that something called "quantum computers" would be tricky to talk about. The inner workings of computers are plenty complex to begin with. When melded with a dizzying branch of physics...

"Quantum levitation" may not be a household term, but one look at a YouTube video now nearing 3 million views, and you'll soon get the gist of what's going on. In essence, it's a thin but solid disc floating in mid-air. Magic and science fiction might be what spring to mind, but in fact what's being...

A recent test flight of Virgin Galactic's private SpaceShipTwo spacecraft caused some tense moments for those participating and observing, but ultimately a new safety feature on the suborbital craft allowed its three-person crew to regain control and bring it safely back down to Earth. After being c...

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