Rare is the tech story whose main development is decidedly low-tech – but not impossible. Rather than a fancy atomic clock or rat cyborgs, for instance, this tech story deals with buckets of rocks and water. Well, solar panels too, but that’s not the cool new part.
Today, at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Colgate University physicist Beth Parks described a new way to wring even more energy from a solar panel — a major development for people with no access to relia ...read more
Last December, a trio of astronomers set the record for the most distant object ever discovered in the solar system. Because the small world is located about three times farther from the sun than Pluto, the researchers dubbed it Farout. Now, not to be outdone (even by themselves), the same group of boundary pushers have announced the discovery of an even more far-flung object. And since the new find sits a couple billion miles farther out than Farout, the team has fittingly nicknamed it Farf ...read more
Insects, the most abundant and diverse animals on Earth, are facing a crisis of epic proportions, according to a growing body of research and a rash of alarmist media reports that have followed. If left unchecked, some scientists say, recent population declines could one day lead to a world without insects.
“The Insect Apocalypse Is Here,” New York Times Magazine avowed in an in-depth story examining the trend, while other outlets have warned of an impending “ecological Armage ...read more
If you were transported to the moon this very instant, you would surely and rapidly die. That’s because there’s no atmosphere, the surface temperature varies from a roasting 130 degrees Celsius (266 F) to a bone-chilling minus 170 C (minus 274 F). If the lack of air or horrific heat or cold don’t kill you then micrometeorite bombardment or solar radiation will. By all accounts, the moon is not a hospitable place to be.
Yet if human beings are to explore the moon and, potential ...read more
Our solar system is a chaotic place – literally. Rewinding orbital possibilities quickly becomes too complex and too numerous for astronomers to calculate. That means we only know the orbital movements of Earth and the other planets over the past 60 million years or so. To look further back, scientists are pulling core samples from deep under Earth’s surface to examine long-ago climate change and learn about how the planets moved hundreds of millions of years ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine