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Millions of viewers have been transfixed by the parade of forensic experts presented by the prosecution over the last few weeks in the trial of Casey Anthony, a 25 year-old mother who stands accused of killing her two year-old daughter Caylee and dumping the child’s body near their Orange County, Florida home in 2008.
In their elegant laboratories near La Jolla, Calif., General Dynamics scientists are doggedly attacking a difficult problem: how to extract controlled power from hydrogen fusion. The pay off for their work is hidden in the future, but the powerful magnetic fields they have built to hold reacting hydrogen gas at 100 million degrees has already yielded a valuable practical “fallout.” Those same magnetic forces used on a smaller scale have proved remarkably versatile for shaping metal.Swift Action.
Six atoms may seem minuscule–especially if they exist for only fractions of a second–but they can have huge implications. The recent announcement that Russian and American scientists finally managed to produce a tiny bit of element 117 by firing calcium atoms at berkelium fills in a missing spot on the periodic table
When I first began writing seriously about environmental issues several years ago, one thing annoyed me above all else: the refusal of many climate scientists to talk about the policy implications of their research. I’d be speaking to a researcher who had documented the rapid melting of alpine glaciers, who knew that it was chiefly due to manmade global warming — but they still refused to talk about what we might be able to do to prevent climate change.
It has become one of the most controversial questions in cancer medicine: Can using a cell phone cause brain tumors?
What is creativity?
For years, scientists have ridiculed NASA’s claim that the International Space Station is a grand platform for groundbreaking research — and plenty of the science done there has just reinforced that attitude. Who can forget, for example, this classic opening sentence from a landmark 2006 paper in the Journal of Experimental Biology: “During space flights, tadpoles of the clawed toad Xenopus laevis occasionally develop upward bended tails “?
If you really want to go green, the conventional thinking goes, buy a hybrid.
You can think of NASA’s Discovery program as a sort of outer-space American Idol: every few years the agency invites scientists to propose unmanned planetary missions. The projects have to address some sort of fundamental science question, and they have to be relatively cheap to pull off — say, half a billion dollars or so
“Lights All Askew in the Heavens,” proclaimed a headline in the New York Times on November 10, 1919. The reason: results had just come in from the very first test of Albert Einstein’s new general theory of relativity