Mind
Color-Changing Dots Earn Best Illusion of the Year Award
Go ahead, give the video below a spin—pun fully intended. Focus on the white dot in the middle.
Did the dots appear to stop changing color when they began to rotate?
Stories by John Matson
Space
Array of Hope: Australia and South Africa Vie for Massive Radio Telescope Project
The ambitious, unprecedentedly vast Square Kilometer Array project should open up new realms in astrophysics. But will it live up to its name?
Sustainability
U.K. Government: "Climategate" No Reason to Doubt Climate Change
Yet another scientific body has jumped in to the so-called climategate fray to dispute that the leaked documents offer any reason to doubt that human activity is warming the planet.
Space
WIMP Wars: Astronomers and Physicists Remain Skeptical of Long-Standing Dark Matter Claim
An Italian research group has for years trumpeted a cyclical ebb and flow in particulate activity that the researchers ascribe to dark matter. But support for the claim has been hard to come by...
The Sciences
Physics tricks could make for one-way soundproofing
One-way mirrors, which many of us know from watching police procedurals on TV, seem a bit magical—how does the mirror know which light to let through and which to reflect?
Tech
Flexible, rolling robot copies caterpillar's escape mechanism [Video]
Robots inspired by nature are nothing new—in addition to all the humanoid bots out there, roboticists have mimicked numerous other animal species, for instance with the uncannily canine BigDog robot...
Space
Budget crunch mothballs telescopes built to search for alien signals
The hunt for extraterrestrial life just lost one of its best tools. The Allen Telescope Array (ATA), a field of radio dishes in rural northern California built to seek out transmissions from distant alien civilizations, has been shuttered, at least temporarily, as its operators scramble to find a way to continue to fund it...
Space
What makes the luminous star known as Object X look so dim?
One might think that it would be hard to hide a star some 500,000 times more radiant than the sun, but distance and dust seem to have conspired to do just that.
Space
Deep Freeze: Mars Orbiter Finds Massive Stores of Buried Dry Ice
Radar soundings point to huge deposits of carbon dioxide near the Red Planet's south pole, which may have once contributed to a different climate
The Sciences
Heal thyself: Rubbery polymer self-repairs under light exposure
What if mending a ripped garment, or repairing a leaky storage container, was as easy as shining a light on the damage?
We're not there yet, but such materials could be possible in the future—researchers have now demonstrated a new way to produce light-healed polymers...
Searches for Human Remains Combine High-Tech with Low-Tech
The Long Island search for victims of a suspected serial killer has relied on aerial imaging as well as old-fashioned manpower
Space
NASA dishes out $270 million to speed U.S. return to orbit after space shuttle retirement
The space shuttle program has just two launches remaining on the calendar, one April 29 and one in June. After that, no one knows what the next U.S.-based rocket to take astronauts to orbit will look like, when it will launch, or who will have built it...
The Sciences
What makes old beer taste bad? Why, it's the trans-iso-alpha acids, of course
Beer, for the most part, is not like wine—it does not improve with age. Quite the contrary, in fact. Old beer is a comparatively unpalatable shadow of its former self—skunky in odor, bitter in aftertaste...
Space
Underground Xenon100 experiment closes in on dark matter's hiding place
A major dark matter experiment has taken a swipe with its technological net in the hopes of catching some of the elusive particles that make up the universe's missing mass, and once again that net has come up empty...
Physics
A Bicycle Built for None: What Makes a Riderless Bike Stable?
The two attributes thought to be most important for a bicycle's self-stability turn out not to be necessary
Space
Coast Benefits: NASA Announces Retirement Homes for Space Shuttles
Los Angeles, New York City, Virginia and Florida will each get a spacecraft from the shuttle program
Space
At Heaven's Gate: 50 Years After Humans First Reached Space, What Frontiers Remain?
Humankind has been confined to Earth's orbital environs for decades, but plans abound for manned missions to deeper reaches of the solar system
Space
A Lovely Swirl: Orbiter Spots a Shifting Vortex at Venus's South Pole
Observations from the European Space Agency's Venus Express orbiter add to the mystery of our cloud-veiled planetary neighbor
The Sciences
U.S. Collider Offers Physicists a Glimpse of a Possible New Particle
The soon-to-be-retired Tevatron collider has uncovered an unexplained signal that could be a previously unknown particle
Space
Lofting Aspirations: SpaceX Plans to Launch World's Most Powerful Rocket in 2013
The Falcon Heavy would deliver bigger payloads to orbit or deep space
