Science and Society

Last Word on Steve Fossett

agincourt — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:21:42 -0400

Nearly two years after he died, the National Transportation Safety Board is out with its final report on what happened to Steve Fossett's plane in the California mountains. Fossett, you'll recall, was the famed round-the-world adventurer, having circled the globe...

The Mystery of the Soay Sheep

agincourt — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:46:28 -0400

The island of Hirta, in the St. Kilda archipelago off the northwest coast of Scotland, is an uninhabited, windswept place, perfect for studying the wild sheep who live there. British researchers have been watching them for 25 years, and report...

Blowin' in the Wind

agincourt — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 18:48:28 -0400

Every time someone talks about the world's need to move on from coal and oil as its main energy sources, the next sentence seems to be that "there is no magic bullet." No one source, they say, can take the...

'Seize All Opportunities'

agincourt — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:33:47 -0400

This release today from the National Academy of Sciences: "In a joint statement today, the science academies of the G8 countries, plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, called on their leaders to 'seize all opportunities' to address global...

Doing Blackflips

agincourt — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:46:10 -0400

Two tidbits: 1) The newest space tourist is Guy Laliberte, a onetime street performer from Quebec who became a billionaire by founding Cirque du Soleil. His pet project is called the One Drop Foundation, a charity devoted to ensuring clean...

A Matter of Curiosity

agincourt — Wed, 27 May 2009 14:21:59 -0400

Clara Ma -- or at least her imagination -- will begin a very long journey in 2011. She's the winner of a contest run by NASA to give a more poetic name to the Mars Science Laboratory, a 2,000-pound, $2...

Cap and Trade

agincourt — Fri, 22 May 2009 10:42:20 -0400

The House Energy Committee worked late last night. There was a lot of compromise, a lot of horse trading. But in the end they voted, 33-25, in favor of a bill that would create the first federally-mandated system to curb...

"Missing Link" Found? No, But it's a Cool Fossil

agincourt — Wed, 20 May 2009 16:45:05 -0400

Ida, the 47-million-year-old primate fossil found in Germany and unveiled on Tuesday, is a no-question big moment in paleontology. But we noticed that the lead search term today in Google Trends was "Missing Link found" -- and that's a reasonable...

Sunstruck

agincourt — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:19:52 -0400

Take a close look at the image of the sun provided by NASA The agency says it was shot from Florida on Tuesday. The dark speck is not a sunspot, or a planet, or dirt on the lens. Click on...

Busy Signal

agincourt — Mon, 04 May 2009 14:45:21 -0400

While Apple, with its iPhone, was generating a lot of buzz (and selling its billionth app), Ross Rubin of the market research firm NPD Group reports that the BlackBerry Curve actually outsold it in the first quarter of the year....