New Mars Discoveries Advance Case for Possible Life
New Mars discoveries are advancing the case for possible life on the red planet, past or even present. Scientists reported Thursday that NASA's Curiosity rover has found potential building blocks of life in an ancient Martian lakebed. Hints have been found before, but this is the best evidence yet. The organic molecules preserved in 3.5 billion-year-old More...
Artificial intelligence will improve medical treatments
FOUR years ago a woman in her early 30s was hit by a car in London. She needed emergency surgery to reduce the pressure on her brain. Her surgeon, Chris Mansi, remembers the operation going well. But she died, More...
Extracting carbon dioxide from the air is possible. But at what cost?
IN MAY some 250 scientists and policy types from around the world convened in Gothenburg, Sweden, to discuss a dirty secret of the three-year-old Paris climate agreement. Virtually all simulations which chart paths More...
The Cambrian explosion was caused by a lack of oxygen, not an abundance
DURING the Cambrian period, which began 541m years ago, animal life took a remarkable leap forward. The first creatures believed by most (though not all) palaeontologists to be multicellular animals appear in the More...
HIV+ volunteers are bequeathing their organs to a new project
MUCH of the medical research conducted on HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, looks at patients’ blood. This is no surprise. Blood is both easy to collect and easy to preserve. But HIV is not confined to the More...
Another’s wasted investment is as disturbing as one’s own
THAT human beings often continue to pour money into bad projects because they have already invested in them and cannot bring themselves to lose that investment is well known. Indeed the sunk-cost fallacy, as this More...
A rocket that devours itself
IT TAKES a lot of oomph to launch a satellite into space. Typically, the payload represents only about 5% of the mass of a rocket as it leaves the launch pad. The rocket’s motors account for some of the rest, More...
NASA to Announce New Mars Science Results Thursday
NASA's rover Curiosity has found something on Mars, and the space agency will have a press conference Thursday to reveal something special, it said in a statement on its website. "The media and public More...
Gizmodo: FCC Emails Show It Spread Lies to Bolster False Claims of Attack
The Federal Communications Commission purposely misled several news organizations last year, giving journalists false information in an effort to counter speculation that senior officials manufactured a cyberattack More...
Expert: Researchers Scrapping Pursuit of Human-Like AI
Amid the artificial intelligence revolution, researchers are scrapping the pursuit of human-like A.I. in favor of putting the advances to date into real-world use, an expert on the topic told Axios. "We have More...
