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Science

TECH: My Flying Car is Almost Here V2

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eHang drone taxi

The flying car stories are flying thick and furious these days. ;) Flying taxis and other futuristic passenger vehicles are about to take a giant leap out of science fiction and into reality. It’s not exactly the vision of the “Back To The Future” film trilogy, which predicted that by 2015 we’d fill the skies with flying cars and get around on personal anti-gravity hoverboards. But it turns out the movies may have just been a few years off. Singapore plans to have airborne cabs taking flight by 2030, according to the island city-state’s Business Times daily newspaper. Singapore’s Ministry … Read more

SCIENCE: If Spiders Ate Humans…

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jumping spider - pixabay

Spiders ― those eight-legged, hairy, creepy-crawling, poison-fanged, silk-spinning arachnids ― are often the stuff that nightmares and horror movies are made of. Spiders primarily eat insects, with the exception of some larger spider species that have hearty appetites for a good lizard or bird or small mammal. But Washington Post reporter Christopher Ingrahamexplored a disturbingly intriguing dilemma this week ― if spiders ate human beings, how many would they eat? The matter came up because earlier this month, European biologists Martin Nyffeler and Klaus Birkhofer published a paper in the journal Science of Nature, estimating the total weight of prey … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Plague

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You say the word plague, and most people’s eyes light up with horror or interest. Because, despite numerous plagues over the course of human history, only one really springs to mind with that one word. One that doesn’t need an introduction. I’m talking about the Black Plague. The Black Death, in and of itself, has had its day in a wide variety of books of both fiction and nonfiction types, even stretching into urban legends to this day. The horror of this disease is well known and used to great effect. As Ducky in NCIS once told us “The infected … Read more

GEEK OUT: Aliens Traveling on Radio Beams

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Aliens Radio Beams

Two Harvard University scientists are suggesting that mysterious fast radio bursts, detected in faraway galaxies, may be evidence of aliens traveling through the cosmos. FRBs are extremely bright flashes of radio waves that last for only a thousandth of a second and are detected by earthbound telescopes. Since the first one was observed 10 years ago, 17 have actually been reported, although scientists think there are thousands of them a day. At first, Abraham “Avi” Loeb said, he took a conservative approach to explaining them. “It looked like the simplest explanation would be flares from stars in the Milky Way … Read more

Where No Gay Has Gone Before: Back to the Moon?

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How many of you have wanted to go to the moon?  Everybody?  Well, we’re all nerds here so I’m not surprised. What is a surprise is NASA’s announcement that there is the possibility of astronauts returning to the moon as early as next year.  2018 is the fiftieth anniversary year of Apollo 8, which was the first spacecraft to reach and orbit our natural satellite.  Commander Frank Borman, James Lovell and William Anders left Earth’s orbit, circled the moon a few times and returned home safely. Acting NASA administrator Robert Lightfoot said last month he wants to fast-track the heavy-lift … Read more

SCIENCE: If An Asteroid Target’s Earth, We’re…

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asteroid - pixabay

It’s the stuff of science fiction: Scientists discover that an asteroid is heading for Earth, and we don’t have any measures in place to prevent the space rock from hitting us. But this scenario is actually more plausible than many people realize.= There are about 15,000 asteroids in our immediate galactic neighborhood. On March 2, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona spotted a 10-foot-wide space rock that passed Earth, “diving in closer than many communications and weather satellites,” Space.com reports. The asteroid came within 9,000 miles of Earth, according to NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies. The moon, by comparison, is about 239,000 miles … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Duel

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Personally, I love it when science is pitted against science and the epic battle that it results in. It never fails to advance our understanding of our home and Universe just that little bit more. And such is the battle I bring this time. The fight over the origins of water on our planet has spanned for centuries, I can imagine, since we learned science. Where did it come from? We aren’t sure, but there are two prevailing theories that are imminently possible: astroscience’s outside interference or geoscience’s native origin. Those two theories have plagued scientific minds for a long … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Frugal

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Especially in this day and age, science is pretty damned expensive. For a long time, science was a hobby for royalty and the wealthy, unattainable to most of the lower classes of society. Even after the industrial revolution most couldn’t afford to science unless they has some kind of access to lab equipment. And even in the age of cheap products and hi-tech, innovative techniques, much less actual science, can cost a pretty penny to start up. Like the 3D printer needed for this idea. But the world of science is changing. Same as other aspects, the equipment needed is … Read more

Science: De-Extincting the Wooly Mammoth

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Wooly Mammoth - pixabay

Did we learn nothing from “Jurassic Park?” A Harvard University scientist told The Guardian this week that his team is only two years from resurrecting some traits of the woolly mammoth, which went extinct during the last ice age. The goal is to create an embryo that’s a hybrid of the woolly mammoth and its closest living relative, the Asian elephant. “Our aim is to produce a hybrid elephant-mammoth embryo,” researcher George Church told The Guardian. “Actually, it would be more like an elephant with a number of mammoth traits.” Church explained to HuffPost last year that the process involves … Read more

NEWS: Zealandia

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Zealandia

We’re taught in elementary school that there are seven continents on Earth — Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America. But geography textbooks across the world might have to add one more to that list — Zealandia. Zealandia is a continent that is 94 percent submerged underwater, which is why it took so long for geologists to identify it. The 6 percent that is above water comprises what many know as New Zealand and New Caledonia, according to a study in GSA Today, the journal of the Geological Society of America. Zealandia spans almost 2 million square … Read more