It’s that time again, Geeks. Bundle up and head outdoors tonight between 10PM local time and sunrise Wednesday morning to catch the incoming Geminid meteors. The map above should give you a good idea of where to look; if you’re feeling especially Citizen Sciencey, check out the just-released, free Meteor Counter app for iPad and iPhone. […]
What’s six miles wide and can end civilization in an instant? An asteroid — and there are lots of them out there. With humor and great visuals, Phil Plait enthralls the TEDxBoulder audience with all the ways asteroids can kill, and what we must do to avoid them. [Youtube]
A Doctor-Professor answers the old question “What is the single best thing we can do for our health” in a completely new way. [DocMikeEvans]
During a large coronal mass ejection from the sun last week, NASA’s STEREO spacecraft spotted a mysterious planet-sized object orbiting Mercury. Check it out Head NRL group scientist Russ Howard and lead ground systems engineer Nathan Rich say the mysterious object is in fact Mercury itself. And what we’re seeing in the footage is the […]
Researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands created air sacs from plastic tubes to figure out how early man might have sounded: All primates have an air sac except humans, in whom it has shrunk to a vestigial organ. Palaeontologists can date when our ancestors lost the organ, as the tissue attaches to […]
A Spanish research facility has shown off a technique for “carving” nanoparticles into complex shapes. It could have practical uses in both medical testing and drug delivery. A nanoparticle is a self-contained object that has at least one dimension smaller than 100 nanometers: that is, a stack of 10,000 would be just one millimeter wide. […]
When a droplet impacts a pool at low speed, a layer of air trapped beneath the droplet can often prevent it from immediately coalescing into the pool. As that air layer drains away, surface tension pulls some of the droplet’s mass into the pool while a smaller droplet is ejected. When it bounces off the […]
Most of us have heard theories about how cows lying down means rain is on the way (it’s a logical reaction, but how would they know?), but now researchers believe animals may be able to detect impending earthquakes. The study began after an entire colony of 96 toads abandoned a pond in Italy in 2009, […]