The innocuous white vapour trails that criss-cross the sky might have contributed to more global warming so far than all aircraft greenhouse gas emissions put together.
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An artificial silicon-based “leaf” that collects energy in much the same way as a natural one could provide a day’s worth of power for homes without access to an electricity grid.
N.A.S.A.’s Messenger spacecraft, which entered orbit around Mercury on March 17, sent its first images of the hot planet’s surface, including its previously unseen southern pole, back to Earth.
British research aimed at helping farmers cut their contribution to climate change shows how to reduce the amount of methane produced by cows and sheep belching and breaking wind.
Mental health remains a huge concern for the space industry, whether considering humanity’s eventual colonization of other worlds or merely the price of a space tourism weekend.
Hertzberg wrote one of the simplest, and most elegant, blog posts (this form truly needs a new descriptive terminology) in response to President Obama’s speech on Libya. It was concise. […]
Those of us who lived through the 1980s remember well the phenomenon of the Members Only jacket. Whether you’ve found one in the back of your closet or not, you […]
What are fractals? The man who invented the term—and the geometry to go along with it—explains how complex natural shapes such as mountains and coastlines can be represented mathematically.
The co-founder of Field String Theory explains why the universe has 11 dimensions rather than any other number.
IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. So wrote Jane Austen in the opening […]
After yesterday’s monster post about the prospects of drilling into the mantle (sorry, the petrologist side of me overpowered the volcanologist), today we catch up on some of the news: […]
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and thus making video calls via services like Skype or Google Talk are already a well established standard in the tech community. According to a […]
Amazon getting the jump on Google and Apple with the launch of its digital music locker service has prompted closer looks at legality and whether licenses should be paid for streaming.
The human heartbeat could be used to power an ipod after scientists developed a tiny chip which uses the body’s own movement to generate power, the Telegraph reports.
Should more be done to limit companies like Apple from staking claims to generic words and phrases? What’s the harm in this kind of appropriation of language?
Fifteen million iPads were sold last year. Charles Arthur looks at the impact of tablet computers on the way we relate to technology and users reveal how their work lives changed.
What if the most innovative kids’ property today was not a TV show, but a website? For Aardman Animations’ head of broadcast, Moshi Monsters leads the way.
Why and how online ad sites need to catch up in terms of aesthetics and usability. They should integrate social recommendations and filter the chaos, for starters.
The other day I asked for examples of practical post-rationality—changes in law or policy that happened because institutions have stopped assuming that people behave rationally. A number of people wrote […]
Mobile apps will get most traction in HR’s workforce management — time and attendance and absence management — perfectly meeting the needs of a distributed, mobile workforce.
The CD and the physical newspaper are now Nero playing the fiddle. They are viewed as the mountains that can’t move on the horizon: omnipresent, and sacred. But they shouldn’t be.
Traditional media advertising remains a more effective driver of online traffic than the social networking equivalent, a multimarket study has found.
Do Not Track allows us to veto tracking by third parties, who are welcome to respond by offering cash-for-data. It creates a market mechanism for negotiating over privacy preferences.
Have you heard of Rebecca Black? If not, you may be living under a rock. Her (sickly-sweet-teeny-bopper) song recently got over 62 Million views on Youtube in less than 50 days. […]
My doctoral student, Trent Grundmeyer, wants to study alumni of 1:1 laptop schools for his dissertation. More specifically, he’s interested in those students’ perceptions of their college readiness, college learning, […]
As educators, parents, and citizens, we need to begin envisioning the implications of new characteristics for learning, teaching, and schooling.
@BronxZoosCobra has 12,165 twitter followers as of this writing. We live in the digital age, communicating instantaneously across continents, but we’re still just a bunch of primates chattering about where […]
If it lives up to its initial promise, the much-ballyhooed new app Color represents a fundamentally new type of mobile social network that, in many ways, is almost the polar opposite of Facebook. What’s so radical about it? For one, Color has done away entirely with the notion of the Friend.
In less than two weeks, I’ll be taking a short pilgrimage from San Francisco to Monterey for the e.g. — an event that has been summarized to me by a previous attendee as “what TED […]
We have never learned how to use instructional media in our schools in any predictable or systematic way. An even greater problem is that we have not learned how to […]