Science

A controversial, game-changing claim published in a journal with a reputation some consider sketchy has the scientific community both praising and damning the reported discovery: fossils of bacteria embedded in meteorites from outer space. "Scanning Electron Microscopy investigations of the interna...

A second high-profile failure in two days has helped make a bona-fide rough week for NASA. The U.S. space agency's Glory atmospheric research mission satellite crashed into the Pacific Ocean Friday, one day after a faulty o-ring caused a space suit leak on board the Shuttle Discovery. A so-called "...

A U.S. Air Force space vehicle called the "X-37B" that caused "conniptions among Chinese space bloggers" during its first mission last year, according to Heritage Foundation Chinese political and security affairs research fellow Dean Cheng, is being prepared for its second mission launch on Friday.

Faulty seals are NASA nemeses, bringing down the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, delaying the Shuttle Discovery's launch late last year, and now hampering the space walking abilities of Shuttle Discovery astronaut Steve Bowen, whose space suit experienced a minor leak just before he set out to cir...

Aptly named Tobii Technology -- spelled with not one, but two "i's" -- unveiled the world's first eye-controlled laptop at CeBIT Tuesday.Developed with computer manufacturer Lenovo, the laptop uses Tobii's eye-tracking technology to enhance interaction at a glance. Eyeing points on the screen rele...

Just shy of 40 successful space journeys, the NASA shuttle Discovery headed to the International Space Station Thursday on a final mission that followed repair problems and bad weather. Known as "STS-133," Discovery's last voyage will take 11 days. The shuttle is delivering a variety of parts and mo...

An issue that periodically makes its way into public discourse -- the impact and possible dangers to brain development and health posed by the ubiquitous use of cellphones -- is being revisited thanks to a newly published scientific study in JAMA. However, rather than offering any definitive answer...

Lasers amplify light. The name itself is an acronym for "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation." It's only natural then that the world's first anti-laser cancels light, and could spark applications in optical supercomputing and radiation oncology. "Our device is a laser that works ...

Cold fusion -- the largely discredited science of making more energy from less -- may be making a comeback. Controversial yet high-profile demonstrations in Italy last month purported to show a cold fusion device turning 400 watts of heat power into 12,400 watts. The eye-popping 31-fold "excess hea...

Fresh from a super-sized "Jeopardy" victory where it looked suspiciously like President Obama's ubiquitous teleprompter, IBM supercomputer Watson is about to become Dr. Watson, M.D. assistant. A joint venture will combine IBM's question-answering, language-processing, and machine-learning capabilit...

Three solar flares will hit the Earth Thursday and Friday, according to scientists, possibly triggering a bigger show of the Aurora Borealis, also known as the northern lights. They may also impact the Earth's magnetic field to some degree, depending on the direction of the magnetic field accompanyi...

Ten-4. Back to you. Over. On a radio or over the TV airwaves, speakers have to rely on back-and-forth communications because radio traffic only flows in one direction at a time on a frequency. Or so said scientific conventional wisdom, until Stanford researchers developed so-called "full duplex" r...

Nurdles. Aglets. Bakelite. Cellophane. There's poetry in the myriad names of plastic, which seems fitting for a man-made substance that barely existed prior to World War II but will most likely outlast human civilization itself. And that's just the 100 billion tons of the stuff we've created so f...

Instantly sorting 15 trillion memory bytes to find the right answer to a "Jeopardy" question: Elementary, my dear Watson. Or so an IBM supercomputer named "Watson" set out to prove Monday, tackling trivia with the popular television game show's all-time human champs, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. "...

For more than a decade, polymer memory devices have lingered in the queue of novel organic candidates for "next-generation" computer data-storage-and-retrieval chip technology. The time for PMDs might finally be at hand ... even if the first application is the humble radio-frequency identification t...

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