High in the cloud forests of Costa Rica, a distinct chirping sound ripples across the landscape. This high-pitched staccato refrain trills not from birds, but mice. Now researchers have found that the tiny rodents making these sounds, known as Alston’s singing mice, take turns belting out their tunes much in the same way people take turns when they talk to each other. The discovery could shed light on communication problems in human speech.
Some 10 percent of the Americans suffer from ...read more
SpaceX’s Dragon Crew Capsule is set to launch from Cape Canaveral in a pivotal test flight for human-crewed missions that could happen as soon as this summer. The only passengers for this mission are a mannequin and some cargo for the International Space Station. It will dock on Sunday, stay for five days, and then depart before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean on March 8.
This flight is a milestone for NASA and for SpaceX. NASA has been without a domestic carrier for t ...read more
Apollo 9 launched 50 years ago, on March 3, 1969, and it might be the most important but least celebrated of the early Apollo missions. In fact, it was so important to NASA’s ultimate lunar landing goal that the space agency had a series of contingency missions in place to ensure it could get as much data as possible if something went wrong.
Apollo 9’s mission wasn’t necessarily glamorous. Commander Jim McDivitt, Command Module Pilot (CMP) Dave Scott, and Lunar Module Pilot ...read more
Science fiction is a genre committed to the concept of "run before you can walk." Long before anyone knew whether heavier-than-air flight was possible, writers were imagining travel to other planets. By the time interplanetary space probes were a reality in the 1960s, the storytellers had long since moved on to thinking interstellar.
Today, two or three generations of happy nerds have grown up in a world saturated with science fiction TV shows and movies featuring the word "star" in their tit ...read more
"Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." The quote is so familiar that most people have no idea where it originally comes from (I'll admit, I had to look it up myself to be sure: It is Mediation XVII from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.) In recent years, though, the words have taken on new meaning, at least for those of us who are devoted to astronomical exploration. Any spa ...read more
